“... Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain? After all, the lights still shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to 1909, Lyndsey Jenkins writes in her sympathetic and extremely well-told account, ‘had given no hint of the rebellion to come’. She threw stones, agitated, got arrested and starved herself. She may not have been a charismatic leader in the Pankhurst mould, but she provided the movement with one of its boldest acts when she had herself arrested ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Saatchi Gallery is a honeymoon with a marvellous girl who has been stitched into her nightie. No less than one in three of the 230 works arouse a desire to have them in a permanent collection here, but no more than three of the rooms in the show give a feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington ...”

“... There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the saying goes, could scarcely organise a piss-up in a brewery? The Edwardian pioneers had no settled leader (the SDP has sound scriptural precedent here): Keir Hardie’s talents were other than those of a Parliamentary chairman; Arthur Henderson was dull; Ramsay MacDonald was both great orator and skilled tactician, though his critics within the ...”