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“... could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore Cooper, for instance. Others he kept at a slight distance. Having done time with the notorious bore Hawthorne, he had the wit to remark: ‘Last night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said ...”

“... Then, in 1932, after completing French military service, Balthus made some copies after Jacob Reinhardt’s late 18th-century paintings of Swiss peasant couples in traditional costumes, exaggerating the doll-like quality of the originals: these are the earliest examples of the faux naive manner to which he was attracted throughout his life. Having ...”

“... World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long bridled at interference by trustees and college presidents. With some associates at the New Republic, Beard and Robinson hatched plans for a ‘new’ school. ‘New’ was in the air. The New Republic had been founded just ...”

“... apportion blame, can also be problematic. The more skilful writers of genre fiction – Le Carré James Ellroy – have progressed beyond merely pointing the finger at ‘them’ (the Russians, SPECTRE) or, failing that, ‘us’ (moles, corrupt superiors), by depicting worlds in which betrayal, double-cross and conspiracy are all-pervasive, where everyone is ...”

“... and the later Whig hero. Newton first came into political prominence when he led the opposition to James II’s attempt to intrude a Benedictine monk into Cambridge without his taking the statutory oath of loyalty to the Established Church. Newton refused to take Anglican orders, but Popery for him had always been absolute evil: in 1714, he tried to get an Act ...”

“... Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered to him is rarely clear, as by his own account it seems to have no particular influence on the ...”

“... and the early structuralist critics showed a decided preference for trivial books like the James Bond novels. Genette was nevertheless strongly affected by the revival of Russian Formalism and by Jakobson in particular; he is as interested as Todorov (and some modern American critics) in the relations between new forms of discourse analysis and old ...”

“... fantasies at work. Soon he gave up writing about the poor; and without altogether abandoning what Jacob Korg calls ‘the iconography of degradation’, he had occasional fits of relative jollity, as in the successful and lively novel of 1889, The Town Traveller. Less Dickensian than Wellsian, this novel is brightened by that rare person in Gissing, a ...”

“... would not have been so shy. Another harrowing story concerns a 19th-century American doctor, James Marion Sims, who was dubbed the ‘Architect of the Vagina’. Because only the poorest women gave birth in hospitals before the 20th century, physicians found in the wards a ready supply of powerless subjects for experimentation. Sims used black slaves and ...”

“... still in its infancy. In 1717, the Grand Lodge of England was formally established and in 1723, James Anderson, commissioned in 1721 to ‘digest’ the old ‘Gothic’ charges of Masonry, published its modern Constitutions. A Jacobite, the Duke of Wharton, did hold the Grand Mastership in 1722-23, but left – tongue and throat intact – in 1723, under ...”

“... that the sidebar on Bloomsbury neglects to mention that it was the Hogarth Press that sponsored James Strachey’s translation of Freud, beginning in 1924. Gertrude Stein receives her own sidebar, only to be marginalised as a collector of Picassos, with no mention of her own groundbreaking experiments in literary genre and poetics. The most serious ...”

“... pages of a book. All his life he was desperately concerned about appearances. He fired the poet James Thomson from the paper he edited for drunkenness (‘The City of Dreadful Night’ first appeared in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). And though he was more or less in love with his long-time collaborator Annie Besant (and she desperately so with ...”

“... a hideous woolly jumper displaying the flags of the EEC nations. Back in the mid-1970s the tycoon James Goldsmith, the future founder of the anti-European Referendum Party, was a prominent supporter of the Common Market. The position of the press also changed. In the earlier campaign the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express enthusiastically made the case ...”

“... Schmitt has also been useful to certain thinkers on the left – Derrida, Kojève, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes and, more recently, Slavoj Žižek. Schmitt’s appeal at this end of the spectrum is his evocation of a force that smashes the liberal façade of the dominant class, his endorsement of the virtue of antagonism when there is a ruling elite to be ...”

“... of election to the House of Representatives on the Whig ticket, the timing was dreadful. President James K. Polk, a Democrat, had just declared war on Mexico. Along with many other Whigs, Lincoln denounced Polk, incurring the charge of disloyalty to the troops. Then the Whig Party confirmed its meretriciousness by nominating Zachary Taylor, a returning ...”