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“... Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent ...”

“... then warned Chamberlain against the danger of a possible Nazi-Soviet pact, something almost no one else foresaw); he was also a man of courage and conscience, with a range of intellectual gifts and a degree of cultivation unmatched by any other 20th-century premier. He won the Military Cross in 1916 for risking his life by carrying his wounded ...”

“... and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman or even joining a monastic brotherhood. The spiritual intensity of his Oxford phase and the dream of brotherhood never left him, but the appeal of the church gradually faded; by the time he set out for London three years later, the disciple of ...”

“... a slothful desire for an easy life, was understandably exasperated by the Ulster problem – but no more so than a long line of politicians, before and since. Churchill – not so easily depicted as a faint-heart – lamented in the aftermath of the First World War that, while the cataclysm had transformed the rest of Europe, the Ulster question remained as ...”

“... of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual. He became regius professor of civil law at ...”

“... 1930 that listeners who tuned in to the BBC for the 6.30 evening news bulletin heard: ‘There is no news tonight.’ Piano music filled the hiatus before the next programme. In the same year the BBC’s Variety Programmes and Policy Guide for Writers and Producers stated: Programmes must at all costs be kept free of crudities. There can be ...”

“... Williams turned out to be a fugitive husband and absentee father. As a refuge from the pram in the hall, he became involved with A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and would often don his secret robes to pass through some initiation or other. His wife was left out of these occult rites, as she was ...”

“... muted. Where the prisoner’s statement had once been the centrepiece of the defence, it was now no more than grist for the learned disputations of the experts. Eigen’s starting date of 1760 marks the first time that specialist medical evidence was summoned to adjudicate insanity in an English courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is ...”

“... lover Laurie Lee went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5. Nancy Morris, who wore the cast-off suits of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, would have brought a dash of something altogether different. ‘She is absolutely uncultured,’ her lover Alix Strachey explained. In the end, alongside HD, Sayers and ...”

“... and laudable pastimes’. It all sounds rather Calvinistic. For all the concrete detail, there’s no place like Utopia. More weaves that joke into the book’s title. Ou topos is ‘not a place’ (but compare eu topos, ‘good place’); in Republic Plato contrasted his utopia avant la lettre, ‘Kallipolis’, the beautiful or fine city, with a banausic ...”

“... as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their dictionary should be ‘no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout’, an ambition that meant there could be no relying on Johnson, or cribbing the work of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, their main rival in the world of ...”

“... became taboo throughout the whole of the United States.’ His planned lecture tour collapsed, and no magazine or newspaper would publish him; the registrar of New York County said that he ‘should be tarred and feathered and driven out of the country’. At which point Barnes stepped in and offered Russell a job at his foundation. His lectures there were ...”

“... specimens in the collection. But even if we could work out when it was acquired, there’s no record of its sex, age or country of origin.Although Grant remained at the University of London until his death, the debates over evolution in the 1830s led to his being ostracised from the scientific establishment (his love of opera, familiarity with foreign ...”

“... faiths is forcibly intruding itself on the religious practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and ...”

“... but also possesses the improvisatory variety and boldness of birdsong. He was probably no more licentious in his English than the perpetually rule-breaking Dickens, even if not up to Dickens’s cool overall command of long episodes of linguistic disruption. Gash calls this passage from Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour a piece of ‘straight visual ...”