“... of commerce. Schreiner was attracted by the energetic power of the empire-building Cecil John Rhodes, yet she was one of the first to smell mercenary exploitation. While Cape politicians, including her brother and leading Afrikaner Bondsmen, were still sycophantic and the Jameson Raid on Oom Paul Kruger’s gold-rich republic was still to come, she ...”

“... had just inherited in shady circumstances, after furious litigation, a fortune from her friend Sir John Scott: but there was perpetual bickering and backbiting about the allowance. One of Harold’s reasons for seeking in 1929 the more lucrative path of journalism was to escape dependence upon his half-mad mother-in-law. Harold Nicolson was born in 1886 in ...”

“... North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a subject of which Wilson knew little and practised less. De Quincey lived in or near Edinburgh for over ...”

“... Frances Yates, Rykwert discusses the interest in architecture shown by the Elizabethan magus John Dec and the possible connection between Dee and Inigo Jones. So far, so good: Perrault had not written yet. But it turns out – another exciting discovery – that Sir Christopher Wren, despite his admiration for Perrault’s writings, was also interested ...”

“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”

“... Romney, Kerry – were seen as repeating whatever they thought the voters wanted to hear. (John McCain, Trump’s nemesis, was a special case, and may prove exemplary for Trump. A sincere guy, now a Republican saint, he appeared to be in poor health and possibly incapable of completing his term. The spectre of Sarah Palin as president made the choice ...”

“... is the violence books have endured. As Cummings peers close at the pocket-sized Gospel of St John in the British Library’s Ritblat Gallery, ‘the hairs stand on the back of my neck.’ The manuscript book was buried in a tomb with Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne soon after he died in 687; it was found when Cuthbert was disinterred in 1104 at Durham ...”

“... to get away from her mother – they share a room – and spies an escape route in Master John Edes, a mild-mannered shipping clerk who has been teaching her to read the gospel. But Edes is an associate of a sinister newcomer called Matthew Hopkins, who is on a mission to root out witchcraft. In wartime Manningtree, Puritan fervour is running ...”

“... yet it has tended to feel the need to define itself against the virtues of good fiction. John Hersey, for example, tied himself in fancy knots trying to describe his journalistic masterpiece, Hiroshima. ‘Things we remember for longer periods,’ he wrote, ‘are emotions and impressions and illusions and images and characters: the elements of ...”

“... inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh ...”

“... but it is not the straightforward utilitarianism that was later to be propounded by Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Haakonssen objects to Hume that he does not explain how our sympathy can extend as far as the operation of the sense of justice would require. Adam Smith surmounts this difficulty by having recourse to the fiction of an impartial ...”

“... past, not of the yet-to-be-experienced future. It is the world of the past which constitutes what John Bowlby has called ‘the environment of adaptiveness’. And, as Alice discovered when she observed the croquet game in Wonderland, outside the environment of adaptiveness anything can happen. Examples abound, not merely in fantasies and ...”

“... He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony Benn’. Today he is more often referred to simply as Benn – a hard word spat out like ‘Lenin’. Benn puzzles and alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English ...”

“... believe that they do not, and nor, I suspect, do they, we do not know what else to say, or how. John Grierson’s cheery utilitarianism, let alone his muscular contempt for most features (‘Now that the fashion in storylines goes for the various deviations in domestic and personal derangement, it may be best to leave women to deal with it’); Cesare ...”

“... and compelling fiction – flourish in Holland in the 17th century? A simple answer is supplied by John Berger. The world in European realist art is ‘rendered up to the spectator owner’. There is an emphasis on the tactile, and the framed easel picture, conceived of as a window or a mirror, is also like ‘a safe let into the wall, in which the visible has ...”