“... to be small, ugly, ignorant and coarse. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge had known her before she met John Hatfield, a bigamist who tricked her into a fraudulent marriage, and both men were united in their venomous hatred of her seducer. Yet Hatfield, whose exploits eventually brought him to the gallows, was, as Bragg shows, one of the popular heroes of the ...”

“... about Dianetics was that ‘the author seems honestly to believe what he has written.’ Hubbard took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and ...”

“... was then that the ideas of the artist as great original and the artwork as absolutely unique first took hold. Yet it is precisely this ‘authorial’ notion of the artist and this ‘performative’ model of the work (that is, as ‘the product of a singular historical performance’) that Nagel and Wood want to put into question. ‘Since the late 15th ...”

“... family gone to the dogs, he failed at school, went into the navy, and then, not so rebelliously, took various jobs in the theatre provided for him by the father of a friend. He married two difficult women who drank and enjoyed their public fights until he didn’t any more, and then the most interesting thing happened to him: at 44 he met the 19-year-old ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... unlike today’s – held that capitalism would eventually produce economic and social equality. John Stuart Mill, one of its champions, declared that if it didn’t, he would become a socialist.) Macaulay’s History of England now reads obviously as a document of its time; which is the way it is usually treated, if it’s included, in history courses. As ...”

“... what he’s set in motion. ‘As a fiction writer,’ he said in a 1978 debate with the novelist John Gardner, ‘you hope that the amount of meaning that you can pack into the book will always be more than you are capable of consciously understanding. Otherwise, the book is likely to be as thin as you are. You have to trick your medium into doing far better ...”

“... to clear. Operation Yellowhammer, the no-deal contingency plan commissioned after Boris Johnson took office, assumed waiting times as long as two and a half days as a result of new documentation requirements for which the majority of HGV operators would be unprepared. Even tiny additional processing delays would cause a significant knock-on effect. They ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”

“... in 1791, allowing US citizens access to arms, was manageable when most firearms were muskets that took minutes to load. Obviously, this is no longer the case. So while it may be tempting to attribute current political dysfunction in the US to particular personalities, some of the root causes are long-term, structural and connected to America’s experience of ...”

“... requested a meeting to decide Seti’s future. Invitees included Carl Sagan and the neuroscientist John Lilly, who believed that dolphins had a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans and had been trying to prove it using experiments that involved feeding the dolphins LSD. The group was so impressed with Lilly’s presentation, which promised a more ...”

“... foreign. The bombing of four Canadians made them aware of errors in targeting, while the trial of John Walker, a white American Muslim, for taking up arms against the United States, highlighted the significance of the confusion. Walker’s defence was that he had joined a Taliban-led jihad against ‘un-Islamic factions’ inside Afghanistan before the events ...”

“... But the cultural Cold War has proved more difficult to assess; no single study can match John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997). Unlike power bloc politics, cultural matters were bound up with local histories, deep-seated traditions and long-standing stereotypes. It is worth asking, indeed, whether there was such a ...”

“... meanwhile, shows his customary tendency to metamorphose into an indeterminate life-form. ‘He took her hand and put it on his penis. The hot sticky organ was already beginning to rise and fill. It moved under her touch like an animal.’ A field mouse? A boa constrictor? Receiving the benefit of Stash’s extensive sexual education, Francesca conceives ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”