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“... happen and in his new essay is pleased to record that it has. Some of this work is extremely good. John Roemer’s formal reformulation of the idea of exploitation, for example; or Jon Elster’s assessment of the extent to which Marx’s models of rationality match his own; or G. A. Cohen’s schematic reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, for ...”

“... about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if reporting a ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern ...”

“... Ravitch exposed the myth of an increasing noble stranglehold on offices in church and state. Colin Lucas pertinently observed that this was a society of aristocratic aspirations defining itself by the status symbols of the past – land, seigneurial rights and office – rather than the economic resources of the future. There certainly was a large group of ...”

“... fireplace. Hanging next to Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings is Portrait of a Man aged 38 by Lucas van Leyden, painted around 1521. The age of the sitter is written on the scroll that he’s holding and, given his somewhat doleful countenance, if it said 40 rather than 38 it would be rather funny. I find it hard to say why I like the painting so ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... Margaret. Much of the very best recent criticism of Jane Austen has been in essays (those by John Bayley and by Peter Conrad stand out) but there is one brilliant full-length study, Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels, that serves as the best possible introduction to her work. And Gard does notice Margaret: he calls her ‘the one completely ...”

“... Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense ...”

“... The iterative wit of the phantom bibliography is at work in the best-known early English example: John Donne’s Catalogus librorum aulicorum incomparabilium et non vendibilium, or The Courtier’s Library of Rare Books Not for Sale. Unpublished until 1650, Donne wrote the text between about 1603 and 1611, and it proved popular in manuscript with his coterie ...”

“... as a fan of his own genre: it’s as if Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons turned out to be George Lucas.) Martin is now much more widely famous thanks to his novel cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, perhaps better known, thanks to the immense success of the HBO series, as Game of Thrones, which took its title from the first novel in the series.† Game of Thrones ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... serve to promote a sense of cultural coherence as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Thus it was, F.L. Lucas laconically reports, that in March 1917, ‘while Russia was tottering into revolution and America preparing for war ... at Cambridge members of the Senate met to debate the formation of an English Tripos.’ Just as world politics colour this highly ...”

“... group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German Cinema’ (Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlondorff). And each has been so prolific and consistently original (Wenders with 14 films, Scorsese with 16) that he has become the dominant figure in his national cinema. Scorsese, like ...”

“... Labour MP disagree with that? What they really hated was his questioning of the private sector. John Prescott had been allowed to pledge the renationalisation of the railways at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, but after Blair’s victory the following year the subject was never raised again. Until now. When I asked him when he first realised he might ...”