“... the manifestation of his mental life. A cabinet of curiosities, a mind museum as much as Sir John Soane’s, it tells the story of a life and a century. It partially answers the question of what Ede was by a demonstration of his ‘eye for the invisible’, as he put it, and what might be described as his form of synaesthesia. He spoke of understanding ...”

“... Second-Class Citizen brought her an American publisher, George Braziller, followed by praise from John Updike in the New Yorker and offers to write for TV: her dream of buying a house was within reach. And an appearance on a panel organised by the Women’s International League in June 1975 made her name as a feminist, even if she claimed in her autobiography ...”

“... a crowd at St Paul’s Cathedral like a captured king. There it was the subject of a sermon by John Hilsey, bishop of Rochester, who denounced the ‘great adolatrie’ of the monks of Boxley and the ‘abuses … of engines’ before encouraging his audience to break the Rood into pieces and burn it.How much of this context can be applied to the ...”

“... share with fairy tales what Angela Carter described as an ‘unperplexedness’, later glossed by John Bayley as meaning that the story ‘knows what it is doing and where it is going, but neither knows nor cares what it means’. This is quick-fire fiction: the telling of the tale is all, and it should be as fast and efficient as possible. ‘When I started ...”

“... a life, even one of a king who believed he sat on God’s throne and wielded his sceptre. John Donne, whom James I appointed as dean of St Paul’s, wrote: ‘A glass is not the less brittle, because a king’s face is represented in it; nor a king the less brittle, because God is represented in ...”

“... of Sherlock Holmes’s dog not barking. He examines in mordant detail one grandiose exception, John Wayne’s Green Berets, a glorification of those heroes with the aging director himself as colonel, which made large profits and aroused loud student protest. Its dishonesty, at a date when so much evidence about the true nature of the war had ...”

“... before the later work comes to seem as much about history as histrionics. When his publisher John Murray tried to clean up Don Juan in the interests of religion and propriety, Byron roared from Italy: ‘You sha’n’t make Canticles of my Cantos.’ But it was not just religious scruples at work: it was a growing cult of the dignity of Art. Byron ...”

“... often convincingly, to Shaw’s need to wish away the intrusion into Shaw’s infancy of George John Vandaleur Lee – or, rather, the intrusion of the suspicion that Lee had been the lover of Shaw’s mother and was, perhaps, Shaw’s real father. In the teacher-pupil (or sculptor-statue) relation of Higgins to Eliza Doolittle, Mr Silver persuasively sees ...”

“... author’s list of hostile quotations extends from St Paul, of course, to, rather surprisingly, John Paul II, with a side swipe at the father figures of Marxism. It is, he claims, only after a reformist group, whether based on church or on state, has been defeated by the resistance of the family and its resolute, ‘selfish’ adherence to its own values ...”

“... to react in a particular way to political issues. In 1841, Jews were encouraged to vote for Lord John Russell (a Whig) because he was in favour of Jewish Emancipation – he won by nine votes. The Jewish vote, clearly, could be mobilised and put to good use. The Liberals put up five Jewish candidates at the next election, including David Salomons (who had ...”

“... Mack Smith writes. (One should not forget, however, that other great European liberals, including John Stuart Mill, had profound misgivings about pure democratic government.) It was the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti who tried gradually to open up politics to wider circles of the population in the last years of the 19th century and the first two decades of ...”

“... for questions. The tale of Hylas, for instance, is one of the better-known episodes, thanks to John William Waterhouse’s painting with its loved-up, spaced-out nymphs. Casually, Apollonius drops a bombshell: Hercules had adopted the boy, he says, after killing his father. He alludes to some dispute over an ox, but has no time to explain: ‘these tales ...”

“... they could not have failed to be true. Undeserved suffering does not merely happen to be bad.When John Leslie defends the Axiarchic View, he appeals to this kind of non-logical necessity. Not only does value rule reality, Leslie suggests, it could not have failed to rule. But this suggestion is hard to believe. While it is inconceivable that undeserved ...”

“... in hideously pornographic detail,’ he comments on one particularly virulent racist fantasy from John Bull, about the consequences of slave emancipation in the Colonies. And he does, at a length of nearly a thousand words (more than two full pages of indented quotation). The same chapter contains a hundred other quotations of almost equally nauseating ...”

“... of ‘Notes towards ... ’, on disarming criticism by pre-emptive apology. But in the words of John Wayne, ‘Sorry doesn’t get it done.’ Thus he writes, ‘(This really has the makings of a Mills & Boon)’ – but lets it stand. He inserts a footnote in a scene between Philip and his rival for Melissa: ‘It is difficult to render simultaneity in ...”