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“... no children behind him, long before Behn had her first play produced.) Before 1666, Johnson/Behn may have visited the English colony at Surinam, the setting for Oroonoko, where she may have gathered political intelligence for Charles II’s government. During 1666 she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where ...”

“... in The Selfish Gene, has recently gained entry into the OED as ‘an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation’. But the idea that culture is transmitted by imitation and learning in a manner analogous but not reducible to natural selection has been around for a long time, and many other terms have ...”

“... by the ‘new journalism’, one of whose tactics was to magnify editorial personalities. It may be surmised that this owed something to the Victorian theatre cult of the star actor-manager, or the pulpit cult of the star preacher like Spurgeon. Hardie’s insistence on his own policies and methods led to unseemly squabbles with the paper’s ...”

“... what can be achieved, by treatment of the sick. We begin to suspect that some disease problems may prove to be, as J.B.S. Haldane said of the universe, ‘not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose’. These issues have attracted the attention of many critics of medicine – a term applied indiscriminately to all who question the ...”

“... as The Wrong Set, and in two succeeding collections, some affinity with the Compton-Burnett world may be detected. Blood relations are pestiferous tyrants as in ‘Mother’s Sense of Fun’, or perform in an insidiously disruptive role as in ‘Sister Superior’. It is when Angus Wilson turns novelist, however, that families begin regularly to face ...”

“... those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general – may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground. There have been hints, of course – but Philip Conisbee’s book is in fact the first to bring to a wide public the new interpretation ...”

“... Goya’s The Third of May, 1808. The scene is laid in darkness outside Madrid, where the city’s captured defenders face a firing-squad. Some already lie dead, boltered with pink gore; meanwhile, the squad ‘a faceless testudo’ takes aim again. The eye is drawn to a man, arms raised, pleading for his life. A point of suspension between life and death, he effectively sabotages the representation ...”

“... what Newland calls ‘a real life’. Newland’s impending marriage to the terrifyingly girlish May Welland cannot be anything other than ‘a sham’; it closes round him with all the stifling force of old, status-obsessed New York society. And yet, much as he wants her, Newland does not exactly want the married Countess Olenska to be his ...”

“... was the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, who was killed in his capital city of Srirangapatna in May 1799 by Company forces. After 1800, when there were few such iconic hate figures available for the Company’s publicists to focus on, the idea of a threat to the Company and its rule was increasingly diffused across population groups rather than centred on ...”

“... research grants and capital funding and can affect share prices. An adequately supported project may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of ...”

“... a notable inebriate) attributed to senates is largely the stuff of legend. To see what lessons may be learned from abroad, Meg Russell has examined seven upper houses in modern democracies. Rather oddly, she omits without comment the most powerful upper house in the world, the United States Senate, but her seven examples still cover a wide range. The ...”

“... EEC did not do very much, and that its conduct in the case left much to be desired. Some excuse may lie in the pioneering nature of the action. Anti-trust laws are a relatively recent phenomenon in Europe and have not been pursued with the same vigour as in America. Cartels have plagued European enterprise for generations; it will take some time for the ...”

“... repairs. The moral ambiguities of the situation are explored, but not the practical one which may well face many: would it be possible to get the job done otherwise? State of the World is a product of concern for ecology. Being against misuse of resources today is like being against sin in the Victorian era: an easy position if you don’t start to think ...”

“... be derogatory: as a historian of the 18th century, I am more aware than most of the benefits which may be derived from monarchical or semi-monarchical structures, provided they are enlightened – and there is no doubt that our President is a man of culture. Nonetheless, the concept of a ‘personalised regime’ remains in itself inadequate to construe the ...”

“... deliberately put about in order to persuade or mislead. The poet, we are invited to conclude, may have chosen to appear bluff, insular and faux-xenophobic (or just xenophobic), but he wasn’t really like that, or at least there was a lot more to him than that, and the ‘more’ included the subtler, knowing self who was responsible for designing the ...”