“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”

“... opening of Officers and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at more length, in which Guy Crouchback and Ian Kilbannock stand in Piccadilly during an air-raid, arguing about whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s ...”

“... it was necessary to find a practitioner one could trust. The 14th-century French physician Guy de Chauliac was unusual in being surgically trained, and was preoccupied with this issue of trust. In his seven-volume Chirurgia Magna he wrote that ‘a doctor should be willing to learn, be sober and modest, charming, hard-working and intelligent. He should ...”

“... reasonable expectations, and colluded in outlawing demons on both sides. By 1987 comforters like John Lewis Gaddis could write that the Cold War and the Iron Curtain had been a ‘way of life’ for more than two generations, with the result that ‘it simply does not occur to us to think about how it might end or, more to the point, how we would like it to ...”

“... on a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters wearing a pair of budgie ...”

“... in my cellblock had broken a plastic pen into shards and tried to swallow them. I heard about a guy in the men’s wing who had used his cooking stove and a plastic bag to asphyxiate himself. You could hang yourself with a bedsheet. I even thought that if I threw myself at the bed frame in just the right way, I could hit my head hard enough to bludgeon ...”

“... vicious war, of which he was the leading orchestrator on the Irish side. On the evening before Guy Fawkes in 1920, 11 lorry-loads of British troops entered Granard, sacking the town and burning the Greville Arms to the ground, in retaliation for the shooting dead of a police inspector in the hotel bar four days before. The hotel was rebuilt, but after the ...”

“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”

“... designed and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous ...”

“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the ...”

“... the end of his second term as President it frequently was. She also played tough girl to his nice guy. Reagan desperately needed to be liked both by the voters and by those around him – a formidable weakness for a politician. I suspect that at least some of Nancy’s rudeness, bullying and nagging campaigns to get rid of people was a case of her doing what ...”

“... compelled to ‘light out’ for a more private struggle. Above all, the tradition of the ‘tough guy’ has been central to the sense of what made people different in America, ever since the English Captain John Smith began exploring the rivers of Virginia and got captured by the Indians. These are symptoms, not of a ...”

“... scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot O’Toole, and the 17 pages of laboratory entries she decided to copy from a colleague’s notebook – just in case ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special ...”

“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”