“... books); the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed ...”

“... a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone ...”

“... and suddenly transformed them into royalists. We can get a taste of the growing unease from Sir Edward Dering, who had been on the side of the people in the execution of Strafford. ‘Mr Speaker,’ he said, ‘when I first heard of a Remonstrance, I presently imagined that like faithful councillors, we should hold up a glass unto his majesty: I thought to ...”

“... him, with the ‘Essay on Exoticism’ as its main focus, in relation to the arguments of Edward Said and others. In passing, it situates Segalen also in relation to the reform movement we’ve seen take hold in the writing of ethnography, whereby ethnographers have been freed to write themselves into the accounts of their fieldwork and abandon the ...”

“... Poetry Center in order to establish a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn ...”

“... of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human ...”

“... this in Milton’s day. The last two men burned for heresy in England, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Whiteman in 1612, were antitrinitarians. In the mid-1650s, when Milton was working on De Doctrina Christiana, his contemporary John Biddle was imprisoned and interrogated by a parliamentary committee for publishing antitrinitarian views; Cromwell had ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... existence on the plateau Selous was prepared to deny. Singing in that language, the extraordinary Thomas Maphumo has established a world-wide reputation with a musical style that melds a traditional Shona instrument, the mbira, and its bubbling rhythm with influences from rock, soul and reggae – and with political protest. Zimbabwe has horrendous economic ...”

“... that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”

“... 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White ...”

“... from world realities go back a long way. In 1913, the Ambassador in London astonished Sir Edward Grey by declaring that the US Army would be prepared to stay in Mexico, then going through a revolution, for two hundred years, and to ‘shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule ...”

“... had ever existed. Who now are the Old Masters? Larkin, of course; early Auden; Hardy; Tennyson; Thomas Hood (in a certain quarter); Byron and Shelley at their most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic ...”

“... only friends in Nashville were white men. She took a trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama with Edward Donahue in his mother’s ‘majestic old Lincoln. Nella brought some sandwiches. I brought a quart of liquor and the set-ups for high-balls. At Columbia, Tennessee I had to “pass” at a Negro restaurant.’ On another occasion, the police started ...”

“... peculiarities of the American political system that you can call the president a moron – or, as Thomas Friedman recently put it on the front page of the New York Times, ‘flat-out dumb’ – but you can’t call into question the sanctity or power of his office. Whatever your complaints, the president has ultimate military authority, and there are plenty ...”