“... Revolution. In Locke’s stead, Pocock drew attention to the less celebrated achievement of James Harrington (1611-77) and to his use of a classical idiom of republican citizenship. Classical republicanism turned out to be a vital hidden ingredient in the history of English political thought, which assumptions about the importance of a Lockean language ...”

“... Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances Larson, in ...”

“... the biblical account. In this way, one could be both a devout Christian and a scientist, as William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick, the two leading British geologists of the 19th century, were. Of course, biblical literalism resurged periodically, notably in the US. But the majority of scientists just got on with their geology, leaving others to worry about ...”

“... king’. Both kings and cockneys, he felt, were very objectionable neighbours in a hotel. Henry James thought the new breed of tourists were ‘rarely, to judge by their faces and talk, children of light to any eminent degree’. Another huge embarrassment was the female mountaineer, sometimes wearing breeches, a sight to attract a hail of stones. Up to now ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”

“... surprising, because they involve much the same authors. David Wilson contributes forewords to both James Graham-Campbell’s volumes, and James Graham-Campbell writes for David Wilson’s, while Christine Fell is, as it were, the religious affairs correspondent for each of them. Magnus Magnusson’s ‘book of the film’ is ...”

“... begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a wondrous act of worship and a curious kind of self-loving. Arm in arm on their way up the High Street, Boswell and Johnson were a ...”

“... in the Gentleman’s Magazine was an extract from a new book by the philosopher and abolitionist James Beattie, criticising Hume and arguing for the equal intellectual capabilities of all races. Beattie himself didn’t mention Williams, but at the end of the extract, the Gentleman’s Magazine added a brief, anonymous comment that did. It was written by ...”

“... not forget the splendours of that heyday, in Bath: ‘The most fashionable library before 1800 was James Marshall’s in Milsom Street, where from 1793 to 1799 the mostly aristocratic and upper-class subscribers included two princes (the Prince of Wales and Frederick, Prince of Orange), five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, 14 countesses, many other nobles ...”

“... a cup of tea and a 40-minute chat with a well-read former bookseller who’d studied Henry James with Tony Tanner. She sent me some promising recommendations – William Maxwell, Rohinton Mistry – but I wondered if nearly £2 a minute wasn’t pushing it. (Phone consultations, at £40, are cheaper.) I asked a ...”

“... and to the catalogue an equally absurd extravaganza of name-dropping. (He meets everyone from James Dean, ‘one of the first people to encourage my art’, to Elias Canetti, ‘the writer of Auto da Fé, with whom I drank cups of coffee in the cafés of Hampstead, while discussing the merits of Chinese civilisation’.) Demos finds something facile in ...”

“... who turned to the church only as the next best thing. It seems to have been at the behest of King James I, who valued the theological learning in which Donne was proficient, that he opted for ordination. Certainly the decision was in keeping with the spirit of a royal entourage where scholarly divinity mingled easily with worldly complaisance. He landed a ...”

“... of Lawrence you thought were dead, and the first published photo of Lawrence’s supposed lover, William Henry Hocking. This is surely the most readable, judicious and authoritative scholarly biography of Lawrence yet written. Yet it also presses hard against the limitations of its single-volume narrative format. By embracing Jessie Chambers’s formula that ...”

“... modern practitioners as L.P. Hartley and Walter de la Mare, to the definitive achievements of M.R. James, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and their Gothic predecessors. The ghost story, or original tale of the supernatural, was essentially a short story, delicately crafted to obtain the maximum effect from its metaphysical equivocations. If it did not aspire to the ...”

“... and the struggle for racial justice. Yet he was widely considered, to borrow the subtitle of James Cobb’s new biography, America’s historian.Most historians are not very introspective and lead uneventful lives, making things difficult for their biographers. So it’s understandable that Cobb, a historian at the University of Georgia, focuses almost ...”