“... ELEPHANT’s SPUTUM’ or to come up with obscene parodies not just of works they hated, such as John Pudney’s revered war anthem, ‘Johnny Head-in-Air’: Wail not the luck of Johnny shagged-to-fuck; he died as quick as Johnny got-no-prick. but also of poems which, deep down, they admired, like Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’: When the Gents has received ...”

“... values. It is at this moment that the cute fables, the family vignettes and the ghastly Janet-and-John style hit the real world with a thud. Britain under Thatcher gave the world privatisation. Blair is attracting equal international interest by taking the dissolution of communal wealth on to the next stage. New Labour is handing assets to corporate Britain ...”

“... Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh.) And the realisation of what separation means, put forward by John Bowlby and others, ended the disastrous practice of keeping parents away from child patients in hospitals. In North London, more was being learned about children separated from their families. At Anna Freud’s Hampstead Nurseries, first set up as a refuge ...”

“... one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It is an arresting retrieval from oblivion. John Lingard’s eight-volume History of England (1819) has been thinly, if ever, read during the last hundred years. But, written by a Catholic priest, it escaped the grip of both nationalism and Protestantism. It gave, uniquely, something like a global ...”

“... on 10 October 1970, as things are quietening down, Feyerabend – no fan of his Berkeley colleague John Searle – describes the draft of Searle’s book on the crisis in the universities as ‘marvellous’. And that he considered saying in the preface to Against Method: ‘I am for anarchism in thinking, in one’s private life, BUT NOT in public life.’ It ...”

“... available from the beginning, and two new ones have been developed in recent years. First, since John Demos’s work on Salem (1982), some historians have been keen to provide psychological explanations of the fear that gripped whole societies, but in particular those who believed themselves bewitched. Much of the most interesting work done on these lines ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a payment of ...”

“... of the procedure. In England the subject took off when it was enthusiastically sponsored by Dr John Elliotson of University College London. He welcomed it not only as an extraordinary new therapy, but as something that could throw light on psychology and pathology, even on the very nature of the vital principle. Mesmer’s claim that there was a magnetic ...”

“... none of that, and it is very bad (differently bad) if this is because they pinioned his arms. John Ruskin wrote to Charles Eliot Norton: ‘So, I know perfectly well that you would work for five years, to write a nice life of me; but I don’t care about having my life written, and I know that no one can write a nice life of me, for my life has not been ...”

“... as the true source of his ‘hypochondria’. Even the spectacle of resignation frightened him. John Reid, one of his clients condemned to death for sheep-stealing, proved so passive and indifferent when Boswell went to see him in the Tolbooth condemned cell that he tried to hire a ‘resurrection’ gang to take Reid’s body from the gallows and attempt ...”

“... and a Parliament no more than a necessary rubber stamp to confirm its conclusions. To a man like John Selden, on the other hand, the notion of a ‘representative kirk’ could do little more than make him cry ‘Praemunire’: to the English, whether Presbyterian or not, the Scottish notion of a General Assembly appeared an entirely unwarrantable ...”

“... well as exceptional. O’Connor was still hankering for a partnership of classes in 1848, but as John Belchem says, writing (in somewhat eccentric English) of the fateful year, middle-class opinion was firmly behind the government and its repressive tactics. We may credit revolutionary happenings abroad with a decisive influence: by inspiring Chartists with ...”

“... that might only be because his epigones have been talking in funny voices ever since. Later on, John Cleese made an almost comparable impact, in the sense that he, too, had clearly got his originality fully worked out in advance. But for everyone else, humour was a craft to be learned, even if the talent was unmistakable. Indeed it can be said that the ...”

“... is that of Walter Bagehot, the Victorian journalist and banker, still believed in by Mr St John-Stevas. She even refers in more than one place to ‘St Bagehot’, which I fear reflects the uncritical adoration this smart performer received in academic quarters in the Packenhams’ youth. The essence of Bagehot’s view is that the Queen is merely an ...”