“... slashing review and the brief glory of a television panel. James’s creatures are Shadbold’s masters, a different galaxy, a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from ...”

“... in 1878, but fled Russia at the time of the Revolution, having studied with a number of esoteric masters in Russia and Asia, most notably with Gurdjieff. One of the earliest results was the treatise Tertium Organum, which Ouspensky first wrote in Russian. A revised version, translated by Claude Bragdon and published in 1921, became a New York ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... a mini-parliament, with its members divided into the three estates of apprentices, journeymen and masters, masons saw their movement as the champion of enlightened conduct: fraternity, benevolence, conviviality and, above all, English liberty. The ‘Royal Art’, so its Constitutions proclaimed, had been practised by the ‘free born ... from the beginning ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... tableau of a secular scene, the bourgeois mode of ‘a window on the world’ (which John Berger once associated with a safe on the wall), or a modernist painting of pure abstraction (which, despite the frequent claims of autonomy made on its behalf, is usually a commodity on the wall too). Like many others, Nagel sees a gradual breakdown of this ...”

“... that the union game was up. Yavlinsky accused Gaidar of tailoring his views to suit the new masters. Ideally, the new men would have wanted to get Yavlinsky on their side, but they were too far apart. Until everything collapsed with Gorbachev’s resignation at the year’s end, Yavlinsky went on working away at futile agreements. Gaidar and his ...”

“... came of age and could spend his own money he went to the flashiest college in Cambridge, St John’s. He later moved to Trinity Hall, where he complained to his rich uncle that he had ‘runn somewhat deepe into my Tailours debt’. He studied law and acquired expensive friends, many of whom he retained throughout his life. In 1623, aged over thirty, he ...”

“... Maconochie, who arrived in Hobart in 1837 as secretary to a new governor, the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. Like Macquarie, he soon drew attacks from those who wanted no reforms. Scots tended, it would seem, to be either worse than the common run of English functionaries, or far superior. But between the place of Scotsmen and Irishmen in Australia there ...”

“... indeed I have just heard from the clarinettist’s owner, the Los Angeles collector and inventor John Gaughan, that the android’s performance was not quite what it seemed, though it was nonetheless impressive. His instrument was sealed at both ends and air was blown into it not through his mouth but through his thumb. Each of the 32 keys controlled a brass ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation. Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... and stability with Leviathan unbound rather than with an unusual degree of constitutional liberty. John Brewer’s paean to the ‘fiscal-military state’ is the most impressive analysis of the way 18th-century Britain actually worked since Lewis Namier anatomised its parliamentary and electoral system in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George ...”