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“... extraordinary travels and his eventual aspirations as a free man – which range from being a good Christian to learning the French horn. Equiano stayed with the godly and genteel Guerin sisters in Greenwich, and took ‘many opportunities of seeing London, which I desired of all things’. He tried training as a hairdresser in the Haymarket, he went to ...”

“... was that in the 1620s, under the leadership first of Richard Neile and then more decisively of William Laud, it was annexed to Charles I’s programme of political ‘absolutism’. Trevor-Roper does not describe the precise content of that programme. If it existed, then the constitutional objectives of the Puritan ‘contrivers’ were surely genuine ...”

“... Hanoverian monarchy and, especially, in the light of certain assumptions about the crisis made by Christian Friedrich Stockmar, that calculating and high-minded Coburg physician, and his employer Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (this last was exchanged for Gotha in 1826). Their outlook could fairly be summarised in the following terms. Europe (and in ...”

“... are here translated as Unmodern Observations by different hands, under the editorship of Professor William Arrowsmith of Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the ...”

“... half a century of preoccupation with dreams, hysteria, hypnosis and divided personality led up to William James’s chapter on ‘The Self’ in his textbook of psychology, published before Erikson was born. Brothers William and Henry: there were two with identity tangles to sort out! All the same, it was only as society ...”

“... originated in the impact made by Evangelical revivalism on a young Glasgow textile merchant, William Smith. Deeply influenced by the military volunteer movement and active in Nonconformist mission work, he confronted the social worker’s familiar problem – that of seeking to retain influence over the teenager who has left school but has not yet ...”

“... conceptions of the great roles. So he began by quoting a weighty commonplace from another critic, William Archer, twenty years Agate’s senior. ‘We have each our private ideal of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Lear,’ said Archer. ‘Every actor who undertakes them has to pass through a triple ordeal, encountering, first our imagination, kindled by ...”

“... A publisher’s note explains that when William Golding died he had written two drafts of this novel, and was about to begin a third. The signs are that this might have been longer than the second, but not substantially different. Some necessary editing has been done, on the basis of notes made by Golding in his journal, and there is a page of typescript missing in the middle of the book ...”

“... before in Mind. In it Darwin revisited notes he had made about the development of his eldest son, William Erasmus, as a baby. He observed William much as he did his seedlings, assessing the effects of external stimuli in an attempt to distinguish between reflex and learned response: ‘On the seventh day, I touched the ...”

“... on the people of Israel in order to raise them to the spiritual destiny for which they and their Christian heirs have been chosen. For Christians, we are told, believe 90 per cent of what the Jews believe, and the remaining 10 per cent only served to spread the Bible’s civilising mission from the Near East to the rest of the world. One wonders what all ...”

“... to form told how bureaucrats could use their ‘creative imaginations’ to make a ‘specifically Christian contribution’ to what might seem to be the most dubious enterprises. I went on record at the time to suggest that there seemed to be some confusion between the Divine Will and the policy of His (then) Majesty’s Government. Perhaps there ...”

“... demonstrations, had the mechanics’ institutes in a roar). And now, three famous authors. Hans Christian Andersen’s A Visit to Germany, Italy and Malta, 1840-41 proves to be a thin travelogue, over-delicate like blanched veal. Eager to make an immortal reputation, determined to see magic and faery everywhere, he forces his enthusiasms to small ...”

“... became a central preoccupation of power politics in the later 16th century, in the generation of William the Silent and Coligny and Sir Philip Sidney – and of Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet, a leading orchestrator of Protestant cooperation in Europe but an absentee from Prestwich’s book. In the early 17th century the same international concerns ...”

“... of opium. (Fears of working-class addiction led to severe restrictions on the drug later on.) When William Munk published his influential textbook, Euthanasia, in 1887, he used the term in its classical sense of ‘a calm and easy death’, not a medically assisted one. The modern conception of ‘euthanasia’ as mercy killing did not come into common use ...”

“... for Arab culture. Yes, American missionaries in the 19th-century Levant usually assumed that their Christian, Western way of life was superior to the one they were seeking to change. But several also developed a keen awareness of the historic debt that the West owed to Arab civilisation, as well as of Christianity and Islam’s shared heritage; and these ...”