“... of the time rather than monastic criteria of moral propriety. In the 18th century the connoisseur Jonathan Richardson had believed that ‘an understanding in a science is the possessor’s property which every man sells at as good a rate as he can for value received. Why connoisseurs should be expected to distinguish themselves by their generosity and ...”

“... regimes many of the rights and protections of the individual against the exercise of collective power appear initially as intuitive boundaries of this type. Freedom of religion, freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, sexual and reproductive freedoms, protections of privacy, prohibitions of torture and cruel punishment are all supported ...”

“... his interviews and his complete short stories in five volumes (there is also a selection by Jonathan Lethem in one volume). And in a final sign of respectability, the Library of America – whose enterprise began with Melville and Hawthorne – now offers Dick in two volumes, with more promised soon: the first volume, released in 2007, sold faster by ...”

“... every week. Religious revivals prove temporary. The people of Florence soon wearied of Savonarola. Jonathan Edwards, preaching God’s wrath in the 1730s in my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought his congregation to paroxysms of weeping, despair and repentance, but after the ‘great awakening’ had spread through the region and made him ...”

“... and electrified Africa’. But for the time being they’re ‘a convenient image of African power on the march’. Friendlier observers see Morel’s campaign as a parable, which they interpret in line with their own preoccupations. Elephants, a French columnist notes, resemble the rights of man, ‘those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals ...”

“... E.H. Carr, as well as Peter Smollett, who was indeed a Soviet agent, and who had probably advised Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm in 1944.Burgess explains at length that Orwell’s list was not a McCarthyite hit list, since the only harm that might befall those on it would be that they wouldn’t be asked to provide propaganda for the Information ...”

“... against countries that didn’t comply, but this never happened. The WHO has never had the power to compel a reluctant member nation. Its funding and staffing were small – 254 in 1949 – and its competencies both vague and potentially limitless. It had the remit to be the world’s watchman for infectious disease outbreaks, but it also had a ...”

“... he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. In 1841, he was chosen by the Census Commission to find out more ...”

“... day in 1921 was his bid for freedom. Not surprisingly, Pritchett is a frequently quoted witness in Jonathan Rose’s recent book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, in part because he was so eloquent about his sense of being educationally deprived. Like other autodidacts of his time (few of them, including Pritchett, entirely ...”

“... when next someone steps onto the stage it’s ankle-deep in water. There is no light at all as the power has immediately to be switched off and when I go into the auditorium (the first night audience now waiting in the foyer ready for the start) there are dim figures moving about the sodden stage, torches flashing in the gloom and firemen clambering up the ...”

“... is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to ...”

“... information could be stripped of the old markers of authority – authority both in the sense of power and in the sense of being reliably accurate – by which we, often without thinking, judged it. It was hard and expensive and required a lot of clever people and technology to design a newspaper page and to print it in hundreds of thousands of copies ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”

“... frustrations with the Civil Service and with the Treasury. Blair reveals that his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, overheard a phone conversation at the height of the crisis between the two Browns, during which Gordon warned Nick not to give in to Blair’s ‘presidential style’. It is a cliché of the Blair years, and not really true, that his was a ...”

“... clarifying to uncomplicate things. But this is all a bit too self-consciously feel-good – what Jonathan Meades memorably pegged as the ‘new, accessibly accessible fun-style fun arts’. Art as a kids’ workshop in which no one ever fails. Which is, you might say, lovely in practice but not the least bit interesting as ‘theory’. If everything is ...”