“... on will-power. She had been reluctant to marry her husband, the statesman better known as Lord John Russell (or ‘Finality Jack’) than as the First Earl Russell, for he was 48 to her 25 when they married in 1841, and nobody supposed she ever loved the man to whom she dutifully bore four children. She did her duty – in Griffin’s nice phrase, ‘She ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... than to elaborate principle into theory. His comprehension of Areo-pagitica, ‘a speech of Mr John Milton, for the liberty of unlicensed printing’, is profound in the immediacy with which it arrives at the principles at issue:The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which ...”

“... too good to resist. ‘This officer of artillery never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example ...”

“... and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless ...”

“... one of the new breed of ruthless mercenaries emerging in the later 14th century, men like Sir John Hawkwood, the leader of the legendary White Company, whose monument can still be seen in the Duomo in Florence next to Dante’s, who hired themselves out to petty tyrants and brought terror and destruction wherever they went. Moreover, Jones ...”

“... Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original works of its kind, a detailed and sensitive rescuing of its subject from the Victorian silence that entombed him. In writing about Symonds, historian of the Renaissance, Ms Grosskurth ...”

“... book is signposted not by my book of 1962, which he does not know of, but by a brief article by Lawrence Keough, ‘The Theme of Violence in Shaw’, which appeared in the Shavian in 1966. To this Mr Silver gives a mention, though only in a sentence appended to one of the notes at the end of his book. He calls the essay ‘acute’ but puts it down by ...”

“... not intent on dismantling a philistine industrialism, but on adding a spot of imagination to it. John Stuart Mill did not reject Benthamism; he simply mixed it with a creative dash of Coleridge. The more aggressive choice for art was to beat science at its own game – to insist that it was itself a form of cognition, but one far superior to the reflections ...”

“... In​ 2019, all four artists nominated for the Turner Prize – Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – shared the award, not at the instigation of the judges but at the request of the artists themselves, who asked to be considered as a collective rather than individual entrants, ‘in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity ...”

“... of mother-son relationships in European and African fiction. Where for a writer such as D.H. Lawrence the maternal relationship is destructive and needs to be fought against, in African fiction, Gordimer claimed, the mother’s kiss, ‘rather like a loving smack on the behind’, is a blessing that releases the son into the world. Be that as it may, My ...”

“... edition (admittedly her letters amount only to a more manageable four thousand) and so did Lawrence, but Forster, fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight ...”

“... handful of the better international medals – those bearing the names of Livingstone, Burton and Lawrence. Thesiger was ‘the first British child born in Abyssinia’, where his father, the British minister, had been escorted to the legation by a tyrant none the less dangerous for having been castrated as a boy. Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India and ...”

“... or prevent his backing some kind of arrangement with the Arabs. He was very close to T.E. Lawrence, whose death in 1935 was a devastating blow; and in 1939 he entered into intrigues with Kim Philby’s father, an adviser to the Saudi king. During the Second World War – at the start of which he procured a lethal dose of veronal in case of a Nazi ...”

“... all round about this. In terms of anxiety-inducing literary influences, he had his effect on D.H. Lawrence, but not in ways that have to do with a sense of humour. His relationship to sexual emancipation in general is far more intriguing, because it took hold in the international sphere, the world of German sexology, Leo Tolstoy and P.D. Ouspenski. It is very ...”