“... there were still the necessary reservations. ‘Poetry is – I fear – incurable,’ he wrote to John Murray in October 1816. ‘God help me – if I proceed in this scribbling – I shall have frittered away my mind before I am thirty, – but it is at times a relief to me.’ To fritter is to waste time, but it also means to break into fragments, a ...”

“... United States who are wedded to less egalitarian premises. Confident of the obvious fairness of John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, which states that inequalities are not to be abolished but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory ...”

“... by two representative titles – Michael O’Carroll’s Pius XII: Greatness Dishonoured and John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. The case against Pacelli is both complex and cumulative. As nuncio in Munich he experienced the seizure of power by the communists, led by Kurt Eisner, who was Jewish. Pacelli had no time for ...”

“... Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his notebooks. Largely thanks to his fame the text was frequently ...”

“... the seedlings. Delivery was complicated owing to ‘the bulk [that] arises from the bellows’, as John Tyndall, the Institution’s professor of natural philosophy, explained.In such peaceful pursuits, surrounded by his family and struggling, though less than in some years, with the mysterious illnesses that had dogged him for decades, Darwin conformed to the ...”

“... in war was connected with suffering in love. Even doctors played up the metaphors. The physician John Sintelaer wrote a long treatise on venereal disease called The Scourge of Venus and Mercury (1709), in which he discussed the case of a ‘certain great Officer in the Army’ who ‘had receiv’d a very deep Wound in the Wars of Venus’, and counselled ...”

“... that his near invisibility sustained his authority and he never sought the limelight, but as John Macnicol points out in a brief but sharp entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for two decades his word was, almost literally, law: ‘In the interwar years no policy proposal could proceed to legislation without the actuary’s ...”

“... such books as Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down and even Room at the Top’ – novels by Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine, which appeared in 1954, 1953 and 1957 respectively. But Bradbury also tells us – he is writing in 1962 – that he finds this positioning ‘rather curious’, chiefly because of ‘the curious ...”

“... on the telephone, that he will very soon have to ‘disappear’. The discovery of authors such as John Cowper Powys, about whom Vaes knows nothing, is paralleled in his reinvention of London districts such as Kensal Rise, Shadwell and Fulham. Remaining in Belgium, he finds another London with which he is comfortable: a ‘malleable’ capital with more appeal ...”

“... able legally to control her own money (which the Littlewoods managed), she sold the film rights to John Osborne and Tony Richardson’s production company for the very substantial sum of £20,000 (the equivalent of around half a million pounds today).In September 1960 Richardson directed a production of A Taste of Honey in Los Angeles; in October it ...”

“... with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His ...”

“... public scandal is infinite.’ ‘By the common consent of all London’, Byron’s close friend John Cam Hobhouse said, Caroline had ‘made a dead set at him’. By the middle of May, Byron realised that he had been reckless; their affair had got out of hand. Besides, he hated scenes, and she could not live without them. In an affectionate letter he told ...”

“... for the diversity of opinion and freedom of information on which correct decision-making depends. John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government is probably the most lucid defence of democracy in these terms. The difficulty here, however, is the widely accepted ignorance and fickleness of the masses. Cognitive defences of democracy tend to ...”

“... under the rule of law then have no reality at all? At least one prominent modern judge, Sir John Laws, has argued that there are higher-order laws which even a sovereign legislature cannot break. In a sense this is theological: it is true for those who believe it to be true, but it can be neither verified nor falsified. What I think is historically ...”

“... facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his writing. He was baptised a Catholic as John Burgess Wilson in Manchester in 1917, the offspring of a mother who did something on the stage and a father who did something with pianos and perhaps rather more with cigarettes. After his mother and sister died of the flu in 1918 he was brought up by a ...”