“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... English classical scholarship to the European republic of letters. She regards him as the heir of Joseph Scaliger, himself a master of vast learning and of a prose style that could bring water to the eyes of his adversaries. Her early chapters show how much Bentley owed to the classical editors who preceded him in Cambridge, Thomas Stanley and Thomas ...”

“... Gulbenkian suspected that if anyone knew the fate of Carnarvon’s collection, it would be Joseph Duveen, the well-connected dealer who dominated the interwar art market. But Duveen thought Gulbenkian’s tactics rather tactless and cabled from his London office that Gulbenkian might at least have waited until after the funeral. By the time the ...”

“... retaliation ...’ Here Mr Scruton’s nerve fails him a little. He has quoted with approval from Joseph de Maistre, the French arch-reactionary, but hesitates to follow him to the conclusion that the public hangman is the key figure of the social order. And this illuminates an emptiness at the core of this amazing book. It is, as he says at the outset, a ...”

“... codes, other ranks chortled rhyming slang. A rabble was roused by, among others, the MI5 operative Joseph Ball, who moonlighted as the editor of Truth and coined the non-adhesive epithet ‘refu-spy’. The reliably squalid Daily Mail was, of course, active in this area. A correspondent, signed only ‘Brigadier, Eastbourne’, recommended that enemy aliens ...”

“... and the postponement of a physical incarnation of the Analytical Engine reflects this. But in 1855 Joseph Whitworth, a leading engineer, offered to build the machine, on terms generous to Babbage. The latter declined the offer, apparently because government help would also be required. This strange and surely instructive moment is not explained by Mr ...”

“... is not a conventional history. It is not, for example, meant to compete with the standard work, John Ramsden’s volumes in the history of the Conservative Party, or with other histories which carry the story forward to the present day. It is rather an essay, or series of essays, on themes and issues with which Ian Gilmour was and is himself involved ...”

“... with astonishment seeing the Pater kneel down to put Barbara’s boots on. Though her own father, Joseph Parkes, held advanced opinions, a scene of that kind would be inconceivable in her family. Ben showed his daughter that it was perfectly possible to thrive without conforming, and that a woman could claim her own space in the scheme of things. Just as ...”

“... and a startlingly original verbal texture. Good rhymed versions of her poetry have been done by Joseph Brodsky and by Robin Kemball, who translated the whole of Tsvetaeva’s collection The Demesne of the Swans. The late Eve Malleret managed in her French translations to convey, not only Tsvetaeva’s metres and rhymes, but also her stylistic range, which ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... the ‘king bee’ was female coincided fortuitously with the reign of Queen Anne, enabling one Joseph Warder to publish, in 1712, his fawning book, The True Amazons, or The Monarchy of Bees: ‘I cannot but wish,’ he wrote, ‘that all your Majesty’s subjects were as unanimously loyal as the subjects of the Queen Bee, in whose Nature there is so ...”

“... doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it. First, the zealots today are no longer the progressives on the left – liberals, socialists, trade unionists. Instead they are predominantly on ...”

“... Powell, whose ‘greatest regret was that [he] wasn’t killed in the war’, the batty Keith Joseph, the transparently pretentious Laurens van der Post, the relentlessly downmarket Norman Tebbit and Alfred Sherman who, though Jewish himself, risked his career to invite the notorious anti-semite Jean-Marie Le Pen to the Tory Conference. The clients ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”