“... 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 ...”

“... couldn’t be sure, you could only surmise. But then surmising is the bedrock of the bawdy music-hall humour that the upper-middle-class mandarins at the BBC were trying to proscribe in the 1930s, and which the popular press has always claimed as its justification – providing traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by which the cognitive faculties were ‘suspended’ or shut down. When Prichard’s follower John Conolly, the celebrated superintendent of Hanwell Asylum, was asked by a judge in 1850 whether the accused was able to tell right from wrong, he replied coolly: ‘We medical men do not consider that a question of distinction at all.’ It was ...”

“... she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s ...”

“... R.W. Chambers, Robert Bolt and the Catholic church. By contrast the More of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for ...”

“... definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing with words relating to sex and bodily mutilation. The second of the three was an unnamed American living in ...”

“... and instinctively deceitful. When his father died in 1930, he erected a tombstone claiming that John Jesse Barnes had served the full four years of the Civil War, instead of an actual six months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent ...”

“... images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper’.Yet when the painter John Sell Cotman was given a camera lucida in 1817, he wrote to a friend that ‘they are used by all ye artists I find!’ The prolific Victorian sculptor Francis Chantrey used one to sketch three views of each of his sitters, which he would give to his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... normally followed by a Hardyesque nemesis, and fall to the old social station, suggests that John Jorrocks, preposterous though he may seem, is a more realistic conception than Michael Henchard. Jorrocks is elected to the Commons at the end of Hillingdon Hall, but Surtees never wrote a sequel. Gash feels that ‘it ...”

“... intellectually dishonest... they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspitters and royal bumsuckers right down the scale’). Mostly, though, he responds equably to the irritations incident to his professions. A certain Stephenson wanted the Hogarth Press to publish his book on citrus culture in ...”

“... of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to John o’ Groats without suffering too many ‘headers’. As everyone knows, the golden age of cycling arrived in the 1890s, with the invention of the inflatable tyre. This was a golden age, too, for the admen, who readily saw that the way to symbolise pneumatic ...”

“... belt’ areas, described many years ago by our foremost environmental geographer, Peter Hall, as ‘a civilised form of apartheid’. Greenness is flexible. It means whatever each of us decides it should mean. Plenty of people, undeterred by history or events, see it as the natural habitat of the political Left. Peter Gould, in his very agreeable ...”

“... through to the country’s bookshops four years ago the notorious World according to Garp by John Irving. The result was a letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta by an enraged ‘intellectual’ who had bought the book for his teenage daughter. He intended it to help his daughter in her English studies, but instead found himself bombarded with all sorts of ...”