“... leaders will look out for their sisters has now faced two rather spectacular counter-examples in Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. It is far from obvious why we should expect women in power to practise a different or more feminist politics. Feminists have long been sceptical, with good reason, of essentialist claims about women, which have traditionally ...”

“... from here to Mark Twain’s ‘The Story of a Good Little Boy’ (who does this remind you of?):Jacob had a noble ambition to be put in a Sunday school book. He wanted to be put in with pictures representing him gloriously declining to lie to his mother … and pictures representing him standing on the doorstep giving a penny to a poor beggar-woman with six ...”

“... we have seen, he later boasted that he was doing just that. So it really isn’t surprising that Margaret MacMillan should conclude in The War That Ended Peace (2013) that ‘the evidence is simply not there to support’ the idea ‘that Europe’s tensions were the product of economic rivalry’. To adapt the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, they ...”

“... persistent desire to mythologise. The most enticing explanation was offered by an Egyptologist, Margaret Murray, who in the first half of the 20th century decided that early modern witch-hunters, far from inventing witches, had shone a disapproving light on an archaic fertility cult, close to nature and the old gods. All sorts of movements found a ...”

“... more ‘family-friendly’ experience. But the broader ideological terrain had already been set by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: socialism and the organised working class had been defeated, their political threat neutered. In 1994, the year of Loaded’s first issue and Oasis’s first album, Tony Blair took over the Labour Party and immediately rewrote ...”

“... with little success, to settle down in San Francisco; there she purchased a mynah bird called Jacob whom she taught to recite favourite phrases such as ‘Awful but cheerful’ (the last words of ‘The Bight’ and a phrase she said she wanted inscribed on her gravestone), ‘I, too, dislike it’ (the opening of Moore’s ‘Poetry’), and her ...”

“... scholars, traces these in detail. The erudite merchant Prosper Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was ...”

“... by threatening to cut or curtail its External Services broadcasting. The director general, Ian Jacob, rightly sensing that the country was divided on the issue, stood by the corporation’s commitment to even-handed reporting. Once American pressure had forced Eden into a humiliating withdrawal from the Canal Zone, the threat evaporated, but the episode ...”

“... the saints, to the cautionary lives of the rich and addicted. The anthropology of Malinowski and Margaret Mead was another crucial inspiration, for their vision of alternative social arrangements (and sexual freedom) provided passionate support for culture over nature, for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had ...”

“... of the portraits from the previous few years. She was the illegitimate daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein. The couple set up house in St John’s Wood, but Freud kept his old quarters at Delamere Terrace. According to one of his constant companions, ‘Lu would tell Kitty that [we] were going to work together when really [we] worked an hour or so then ...”

“... scum’ and complained that I was ‘marrying the daughter of a New York yid’. This yid was Jacob Epstein.Soon after my mother died I had a dream. I saw her in a bathtub in which there was no water. She was paralysed from the waist down and instead of the pubic hair I had seen as a young child there was a large open wound. Through the upper part of the ...”

“... radical, antinomian Blake who belonged in the dissenting company into which he had been coerced by Jacob Bronowski (a Cambridge scientist/poet of an earlier generation) and E.P. Thompson (in Witness against the Beast). Ackroyd’s life of Blake had to ease him away from all that, portraying a wilfully obtuse man, with his spites and his angels. He is ticked ...”

“... of a sexual obsession.’ A couple of pages later we learn that the screenwriter and lyricist Jacob Brackman liked nitrous oxide so much he filled a six-foot tank with it at home and deducted it as a medical expense.There are only glancing references to substance abuse in Pandora’s Box. As for sex, Biskind’s consciousness of the obstacles and attacks ...”

“... in fact support some legal access to the termination of unwanted pregnancies. On the other side, Jacob Rees-Mogg, at time of writing still minister for Brexit opportunities, blithely concedes that these benefits may take fifty years to eventuate. Yet, for all the ideological elitism at the top, both of these movements have also relied on the prejudices and ...”