“... Romantic movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of ...”

“... Positively medieval,’ we say, implying a scheme of historical periods which underlies most of what we think and do. The Middle Ages, to 1485, were barbarous and, luckily for them, also an ‘age of faith’; then came the Renaissance with its humane values and realism, a recognisable ancestor to the modern world. The job of testing the assumptions behind this distinction is never-ending, and we must be grateful to scholars who have done it well ...”

“... Europe of Hildegard of Bingen, Ramon Llull, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, Catherine of Siena, John of the Cross, Henry Vaughan, Blaise Pascal, George Fox, Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, William Law, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Bernardette, among tens of thousands of others, needs lessons in spirituality or mysticism from Asia.Gibran’s fans ...”

“... the recommendations, in whole or in part, of the Commission on Social Justice, appointed by John Smith and chaired by Sir Gordon Borrie, instead of trying to think the unthinkable. The third reason is that a Third Way, as an organised body of principles, is really not possible. No political theorist, however distinguished, can act as though the country ...”

“... and to co-ordinate and finance standing armies. Nearly a decade ago, in The Sinews of Power, John Brewer undermined the foundations of this view of British exceptionalism with his portrait of an 18th-century British state that was, in key respects, large, strong, militarised, modern and highly bureaucratic. The British Navy, no less than Continental ...”

“... O’Brien, reviewed in the present issue, dramatises the experiments and predations of the surgeon John Hunter, founder of the Hunterian, as he sniffs out his raw material – including one of the ‘Irish giants’ who showed themselves to the crowd for a fee in 18th-century London. The new, modern sensitivity to these abuses grows out of the corpse of ...”

“... around US military facilities have convinced him that they already have their own flying saucers. John E. Mack is, however, the jewel in the abductees’ crown. He is a Harvard professor who says that ‘you can’t say this phenomenon shatters our notions of physical reality and then treat it entirely literally in terms of our physical reality.’ Quite. At ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... recognition, not rhetoric, is of the line of Gorgias, while Vickers is one of the sons of sound John Locke. Anagnorisis, ‘recognition’ (usually of people believed lost or dead), is the poor relation in the family of Aristotelian literary terms. Hamartia, mimesis, catharsis are august words of power, but ‘recognition’ is almost an embarrassment to ...”

“... Indian teams had to be captained by whites. The most notorious example was the reappointment of John Goddard to lead the tour of England in 1957 over the obviously superior claims of Frank Worrell. This particular anomaly led directly to defeat, and had its share in the disaster at Edgbaston in the first test, when Ramadhin was required to bowl 98 ...”

“... make women? At 19 she was close to suicide, but found strength to go on from reading Emerson and John Stuart Mill. These are her own landmarks, ‘disconnected but indelibly printed in the mind’. At 20, she began to write The Story of an African Farm. If she had been the child of an English Evangelical parsonage, she would have been conforming, in her ...”

“... a huge majority, Gollancz started up the Left Book Club. Here were three socialists – Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski – meeting in a restaurant and establishing a publishing venture which would, over ten years, produce and sell six million books, most of them new, and all of them aspiring to a social order where the common interest would ...”

“... hosts are suitably variegated: Lord Glenconner (Colin Tennant) in St Lucia; the historian Sir John Plumb (‘peppery but very entertaining’) also in St Lucia; Norman Parkinson, the photographer, in Trinidad. He visits Richard Branson’s house in the Virgin Islands, pronouncing it to be more tasteful than others he could (and does) mention. He finds ...”

“... is the Palladian Chapel which Fanny Burney described as ‘a Pantheon in miniature’. Designed by John Tasker for Thomas Weld and made by Italian craftsmen in 1792, this is widely known as the first free-standing Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation. Meanwhile Saint Andrews, the old village church from which Weld bones were removed to ...”

“... was published in 1977 in the volume Essays in Labour History 1918-1939 edited by Asa Briggs and John Savile. During the Twenties, the scale of unemployment benefit increased dramatically: compared with November 1920, the amount drawn by a man with a dependent wife and two children had risen 240 per cent in real terms by May 1931. But the abandonment of ...”