“... chains being used against black Africans’. Miller finds damning evidence in the 1804 memoirs of Joseph Mosneron, a slave trader from Nantes. Mosneron attributes his education in ‘moral ideas’ to Rousseau, but doesn’t express any qualms about profiting from the trade. In one passage, Mosneron recounts that while waiting for a cargo of slaves to be ...”

“... in this drama: the Imagists – H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell – as well as scores more who had a stake in the continuing vitality of literature, including Yeats, Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The writers, clustered in clubs or ‘gangs’, wanted to ...”

“... The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets. Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik ...”

“... nihilism, his boundless self-pity disguised as principled hatred of everything. His fixation on Joseph Brodsky as the mortal enemy blocking his route to world fame. And the banality of Limonov’s ‘scandalous’ books, suggestive of Henry Miller’s, if Miller were viciously bloody-minded and thought Stalin was the greatest thing since apricot ...”

“... A 1984 publication from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in their minds at the time. Few ...”

“... and imitated ‘superior’ Italian humanism. In this she is following the lead of the late John Hale, whose last book, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance, let the Danube School of artists, Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, share space with Leonardo et al. Rublack’s quest has taken her to fascinating primary sources in German ...”

“... regarded as hallucinations? Such questions were put to the test by Esquirol’s protégé Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, who experimented with large doses of hashish in the company of a literary demi-monde that included Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire. He concluded that, even at the mindbending peak of its effects, hashish produced only ...”

“... had argued for state planning in The Social Function of Science. In response the Oxford geneticist John Baker set up a Society for Freedom in Science, with a passionate attack on any attempt to tell scientists what they should work on or the methods they should use. The conflict between Bernalian and Bakerian views of science runs throughout Freedom’s ...”

“... either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.’ This is like Joseph Conrad’s mock-horror at being told that he had at last, in an essay, revealed his philosophy. ‘Do I have a philosophy? Shall I die of it?’ At the very least, the modern intellectual novelist has felt a strong inclination to cover his tracks. Oddly ...”

“... unsettling impression of being otherwise cut up. Contrasted perhaps with Moreau’s 1876 vision of John the Baptist’s head, we see in The Gross Clinic how perspective may be arranged – to disfigure figures more traumatically – by making them difficult for the beholder to figure out. A modern account of the Medusa attraction is that of the ...”

“... not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was Thomas Rymer, not Edward; it was in the ruins of the Capitol, not the Colosseum, that ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... large ones, while an inability to blush was thought to be characteristic of criminal types. Franz Joseph Gall, who invented phrenology, believed that the moral and religious faculties were located at the top of the brain, since this was the area of the skull closest to God. Roosevelt, Coolidge and Churchill all expressed their enthusiasm for eugenics, and ...”

“... Thatcherism which the present leadership of the Party obviously favours. The domination, since John Smith’s death, of the Party and its machine by people associated with the soft Left has, paradoxically, exposed it even more to bastard Thatcherism. The victory of the soft Left meant the vanquishing not just of the Bennite Left but also the Gaitskellite ...”

“... wan, sometimes wanton, according to the interplay between Humbert’s sentimentality and desire. John le Carré’s Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym, owes his training to a con man father. The only way for the child to know what is going on (Ricky Pym’s words and actions don’t tell him – on the contrary, they are monstrous mystifications) is to keep watch, to ...”