“... Letters carried powerful charges. Intellectuals of very different origins and interests – like John Locke and Giambattista Vico–cared deeply about the French versions and summaries of their ideas which could bring them to, or distort them for, a European public unwilling or unable to read English and Italian. Unfortunately, like more modern literary ...”

“... the immediate aftermath of Conceptual Art, in the late Sixties and on into the Seventies, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Victor Burgin, Les Levine and others used billboards for work which blended fine art with political propaganda. By dethroning painting, Conceptual Art opened the gates to a range of other media, not simply text and installation, but also ...”

“... dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil ...”

“... going on’, 1914 wiped out any ambivalence. The immensely popular Inside Europe (1940) of John Gunther summarised feelings on this side of the Atlantic: ‘It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred ...”

“... tradition that we use to understand our lives. In Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992), John Gray proposed a vulgarised version of narrativist-deconstructionist psychoanalysis. Since we ultimately ‘are’ the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the solution to a psychic deadlock resides, he proposes, in a ‘positive’ rewriting of the ...”

“... Revolution (1990), found Cairo University records giving Arafat’s birthplace as Cairo. Janet and John Wallach, who wrote Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder (1990), came up with his Egyptian birth certificate. Arafat shrugged off the disclosure. Said Aburish, a Palestinian whose biography is the best available in English, sympathises with Arafat’s original ...”

“... harmony with nature, they have done so only by sloughing off the association with cannibalism. In John Boorman’s Hollywood movie, The Emerald Forest, the cannibal Indians are the bad guys, in league with the dam-builders who will flood the forest and dispossess the friendly Indians who are the film’s heroes. This is in line with Lestringant’s general ...”

“... remind one of Mill’s correctively secular comment in On Liberty: ‘It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either.’ The young Augustine was more inclined to the Periclean than to the religious-ascetic life. He first travelled to Carthage in 371, to study rhetoric, and there he fell in with a group ...”

“... we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby managing to dismiss any rival interpretations as ...”

“... now. So it is that we learn that as an actor Shakespeare played Old Hamlet, Adam, Friar Laurence, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Egeon and Duncan, but then again perhaps he didn’t, since all we have in support of this claim is a late rumour and some unverifiable computer analysis. Shakespeare’s will seems to confirm a well-established estrangement from not just ...”

“... little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and explains – are ...”

“... to learn a long time before, at the hands (or the beards) of the Great Victorians. The narrator, John Dowell, effaces himself to the point of colluding with, or ignoring, or not even noticing, his wife’s seduction by his best friend, Edward Ashburnham, the perfect English gentleman. Dowell (Do-Well?) observes that he has had 12 years of ‘playing the ...”

“... auction, as expected, was the Jean Louis sheath dress, covered in tiny stones, worn by Marilyn at John Kennedy’s birthday tribute in 1962, when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’. This went for over a million dollars. The man who bought it (owner of a memorabilia shop called Ripley’s Believe It or Not) thought he’d got a great bargain. The Kennedy dress ...”

“... The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in search of a new discovery, says that the Salsette is ‘the Mecca of South Coast wreck-diving. Ask any Weymouth skipper and it seems that just about every charter group wants to dive this one.’ Robert Louis ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with ...”