“... Casement, thinks that we should not – it took place on 3 January 1904 and lasted only one day. Joseph Conrad had met Casement first in 1889 or 1890 in the Congo, when Casement was working for the Congo Railway Company. ‘For some three weeks,’ Conrad wrote, he lived in the same room in the Matadi Station of the Belgian Société du Haut-Congo. He was ...”

“... than fifty years. It was engineered by several extraordinarily persuasive dealers, most notably Joseph Duveen, who ensured that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... or fell to their deaths when they thought immigration officials had arrived to deport them. Joseph Nnalue, 31, 23/10/94, a Nigerian, died after falling from a balcony in a flat in Stockwell – police and immigration officials were calling at his flat at the time . . . Noorjahan Begum, 35, 15/3/96, a Bangladeshi woman, died after falling 30 feet from ...”

“... make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist Joseph Hooker. This first recorded appearance of the handy distinction between those who bundle up the data into one big theory and those who prefer to lay out the exhibits on the table in carefully separated heaps has since spread from scientific classification ...”

“... lay behind his homespun appeal (he ended his career as the prosecuting attorney at the trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher charged with teaching evolution in 1925). France, meanwhile, was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. Division on this scale is potentially fatal to democracy; trust, as Runciman reminds us, is its lifeblood. However, both ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... appears to Mary to tell her she will become the mother of God and another, unnamed angel forewarns Joseph about the Massacre of the Innocents.Many angels are also famous saints. The town of Saint-Raphaël lies close to Saint-Tropez, but the two resorts’ patrons belong to different orders of heavenly being (Raphael is an archangel; according to legend, St ...”

“... and in many areas health indicators have collapsed to Third World levels or worse. The thesis of John Gray’s new book is that Green movements in the West have yet to come to terms with the implications of the socialist environmental disaster, and that when they do, they will turn naturally to ideas associated with the conservative defence of free ...”

“... intellectuals included some famous names: Bryce, Courtney, Freeman, Lecky, Lowe, J.S. Mill, John Morley. A nervous concern about the consequences of mass franchise, worries about the concessionary mood of the Liberal leaders – especially in the face of violence in Ireland – led many Late Victorian Liberal intellectuals to drift rightwards toward ...”

“... between collective memory and conscience, and the art of the storyteller. In both Hughes’s and John Milne’s novels the haunting events have to do with Nazi Germany. Ernst Kestner, Hughes’s pork butcher, is a German ex-soldier who feels impelled to revisit the scene of a World War Two massacre in occupied France. Kestner is in his sixties and is dying ...”

“... to the reckless domestic and international adventurism of his liberal successors. Admirers of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and of the dynamism of their years in office interpret the new defence of Eisenhower – correctly – as an assault on their own belief in active, affirmative government, an assault different in its origins but oddly similar in ...”

“... teens, C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music ...”

“... all the more powerful for that. ‘I have only recently become a Conservative,’ declared Keith Joseph, one of Thatcher’s closest Party allies, in the early 1970s. (One is reminded of the film Elizabeth, and of its heroine’s no less momentous and politically charged declaration: ‘I have become a Virgin.’) ...”

“... The American philosopher John Dewey thought that democracy should be like a giant conversation: the nation talking to itself about its hopes and fears and listening to what other people have to say. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Dewey, he never got to hear what such a conversation might sound like, because the technology wasn’t available ...”