“... 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 of ...”

“... three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a ...”

“... the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the restoring of monarchy.’ This remark functions mainly as an alibi for his loyalty to the post-Protectorate political structure, and is intended to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John ...”

“... publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on the barricades or their daring escapes meant nothing: ‘these people’, wrote Amalie Struve from ‘the gloomy banks of the Thames’, ‘do not know our ...”

“... twice, first Donald Ferguson with whom she spent two years in Burma and then, by common law, Stuart Edmonds, a wealthy dilettante artist. She had two children, to whom she appeared indifferent: a daughter who died in infancy and a son who was killed in World War Two. She fictionalised both her husbands, Ferguson appearing most memorably as the ...”

“... by the Most Eminent Hands, continued for decades and made him an arbiter of modern writing: Alexander Pope made his print debut in the 1709 miscellany, which also contained work by rising names like Anne Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast ...”

“... annals of 19th-century science overflow with testimonies to the powers and pleasures of the body: Alexander von Humboldt (echoed by Darwin) exulting over the sublimities of tropical landscapes, James Clerk Maxwell affirming the muscular knowledge derived from experiment, dozens of hardy travellers (including Galton) relishing the sights, sounds and smells of ...”

“... forged an unlikely alliance between academic astronomy and the emergent earth mysteries movement. Alexander Thom, formerly a professor of engineering at Oxford, published the conclusions of a decade’s worth of measurements which had led him to believe that Britain’s standing stones were arranged using precise units and sometimes complex astronomical ...”

“... away from Stoke Newington Road concealed nuclear pockets in the secret history of our culture: Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife (1963), set in a terrace off Amhurst Road, which was where the poet Tom Raworth (‘Raworth is the man in the Island with the word in his mouth’ – Ed Dorn) operated in his Matrix Press days. A few hundred yards to the north ...”

“... issue was closely tied to political concerns. Well-educated, ambitious, a keen reader of John Stuart Mill and a very English Crown Princess at a hated Prussian Court, she initially dreamed of her eldest son as a liberal Frederick the Great. Instead, he and his closest siblings Heinrich and Charlotte became ‘complete Prussians in their nature’. It was ...”

“... Italian city. Hardly a minnow can have slipped through the net, though it has landed one whopper: Alexander Trippel, who was Swiss and described by a German in 1782 as ‘the greatest sculptor in Rome, that is to say the world’, is included as if he were an obscure British artist known only because he exported a relief and a portrait bust. This slip is of ...”

“... the universality of its appeal to law. Among the committee’s leaders were John Bright and John Stuart Mill; among its supporters Darwin, Huxley, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Hughes. Eyre’s supporters, led by Carlyle, included Ruskin, Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, as well as characters like the Earl of Cardigan, whose display of judgment at Balaclava did ...”

“... he established a new unit, which quickly became known as the ‘anti-mugging squad’.In 1978, Stuart Hall wrote in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order of the emergence of a new word – ‘mugging’ – which was used to describe a supposedly ‘new strain of crime’:In the ‘mugging’ period the police gained deliberate ...”

“... George of Denmark, confined himself largely to trying (and failing) to provide a successor to the Stuart crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince Albert’s consortship from his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840 to his early death in 1861 that a hundred years later there was hardly any anxiety about the succession and marriage of Princess ...”

“... colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John Stuart Mill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people self-evidently incapable of self-rule. ‘Despotism,’ he wrote, ‘is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be ...”