“... Keith Thomas puts it, ‘changing gestural codes offer a key to changing social relationships.’ Peter Burke points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a ...”

“... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court entertainments.’ In ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the ...”

“... an enduring (quasi-)Marxist current in British gay activism, represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is ...”

“... of people who worked outside – and against – official Government policy. Chief among them was James Guerin, a Bible-thumping chorister-entrepreneur from Connecticut, who made a fortune by flouting his Government’s policy on arm sales – especially to South Africa and Iraq. When he was short of money in 1987, Guerin came to Britain and tricked one of ...”

“... from the established Church. No effort was made to unify the diverse American possessions until James, Duke of York’s disastrous attempt to create a quasi-Spanish viceroyalty with the Dominion of New England in the 1680s. Nor did the Church of England ever extend its episcopal hierarchy to the colonies. These early failures to export central English ...”

“... he cared most about, though A Christmas Garland is probably his best: Edmund Gosse reported Henry James as calling it ‘the most intelligent thing that has been produced in England for many a long day’. Several of these letters defend the climax of Zuleika, when the undergraduates commit mass suicide for love of the heroine. With uncharacteristic ...”

“... Interval discussion of the work’s ‘deflected’ sexuality is interrupted by the appearance of Peter Pears, who arrives as a living witness from a kind of heroic era for homosexual artists. The Swimming-Pool Library is a rich and clever and funny novel. The richness is in large part a matter of the density of detail the book manages to accumulate, detail ...”

“... nature. Invited in 1873 to join a new society for metropolitan physicists, the Cambridge professor James Clerk Maxwell set out in his witty way the practical philosophy of this public science. He thought soirées were like clouds of gas particles: they allowed buttonholing only during the brief if violent collisions of their participants. Lecture-rooms were ...”

“... philosophical investigation into aspects of meaning in Mozart’s last three symphonies to James McKinnon’s critique of the myth of the Phrygian aulos, the instrument whose exciting and sensuous sound was supposedly rejected on ethical grounds. The collection starts well, with a scrupulous examination by Christoph Wolff of Mozart’s arrangement of ...”

“... bourgeois, a Wilcox rather than a Schlegel or even a Leonard Bast. Or so it can easily seem. James Gindin, however, seeing the case in quite another light, challengingly subtitles his biography ‘An Alien’s Fortress’ and suggests at the outset that, despite appearances, Galsworthy had his full share of the discontent and the divided mind needed to ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... too glad to avoid vengeance from his fellows by impersonating the great in perpetual concealment; James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who financed Hitler?, which opens with a luxurious gathering of bankers and party ‘higher-ups’ with their sleek women, just a shade less exotic than the gathering in a Japanese restaurant of Spanish-speaking kameraden that ...”

“... domini regis. What did they pay Chaucer for? Why was he so useful? Is there any clue to his James Bond activities in his poetry? At any rate it is a pleasure to have a literary subject who appears to have been taken seriously in his own lifetime, to have had a role in the great world. No wonder, then, that Chaucer’s biographers have been so ready to ...”