“... in the same city in 1968, when politics was still for real. (The Mayor of Chicago is still called Richard Daley, but with the mediocre son all resemblance ends.) The irony, such as it was, occurred at the expense of the journalistic profession, which is why I say that they awoke, or half-awoke, to what they had done. Ever since the preceding Republican ...”

“... nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all would-be revolutionaries; and one suspects that those ...”

“... Vaizey has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war ...”

“... sequence of dreary rhyming couplets at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th ...”

“... self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle. Richard Bourke is a formidably talented political historian whose Empire and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has read widely and deeply in Hegel – not for some of us the most enthralling way of passing ...”

“... seemed absurd to a previous generation of biologists and geneticists, led by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, who forcefully opposed arguments for the genetic determination of intelligence. IQ tests attracted particular criticism, with Gould devoting a considerable proportion of The Mismeasure of Man (1981) to dismissing IQ scores as artefacts of flawed ...”

“... well-chronicled activities in France and historically decisive foundation of Normandy. All four may be described as coffee-table books, and all four sustain their publishers’ well-earned reputation for superb illustrations – though a symbolic reductio ad absurdum of modern techniques is the obliteration of much of David Wilson’s foreword to The Viking ...”

“... by the restored Bourbons. Although now incorporated within a much larger museum complex, it may claim to be the earliest, as well as the most spectacular, surviving museum devoted to the art of the Middle Ages. Hill, however, concentrates her attention on Normandy, which was of special interest to British as well as French antiquaries. In the early ...”

“... from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million. The newsagent in question is on Willesden High Road, where every shop that isn’t a newsagent is a takeaway. The streets of low-rise housing go on for ever and ...”

“... is probably the one that rests most heavily on potentially verifiable claims about reality. As Richard Dawkins observes, Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims. The same is true of many of the major doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The Virgin birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection of ...”

“... from between the fourth pre-molar (or wolf-tooth) and the corner incisor in the lower jaw. They may reach a foot in length, although eight inches is more common. Xenophon warns of their heat: the angrier the boar the hotter they become. The tusks of the boar of Kalydon, displayed first in the temple of Athene at Tegea in Arcadia and later in Rome, were ...”

“... among the circles, picnic, dance, play instruments and celebrate ‘as many of our ancestors may have done for thousands of years’. The Megalithic Portal website’s vagueness is justified. Nobody knows what rituals Stonehenge was built for, and the celebrations in their present form date back a mere seven years to a House of Lords ruling under the ...”

“... many of them violent. But the bit of plot there is takes us, finally, to an interesting place. Richard Cane, brilliantly played by Danny Huston, is an infinitely rich man who owns every technology and invention and effectively rules the world. We are no doubt supposed to think of whichever American billionaire we like least. The trouble is that although ...”

“... theory: if Cobbett comes out with something illiberal, unscientific or backward-looking, he may be excused and the blame put on the primitive age in which he lived. There is, of course, something patronising about this. He was ‘the last great tribune of the agrarians’, wrote G.D.H. Cole, and, ‘by force of circumstances, also the first great ...”

“... enthusiasm, ending in a wild ovation – for whom? For Grenfell or for Lipman? Some of them may not have been quite sure. This element of doubt in their delight is typical of that teasing ambiguity which has always been inherent in the act of theatre-going – an ambiguity exploited to fullest effect by the art of Barry Humphries. Perhaps because I have ...”