“... but that cut little ice with Britain’s puritans, and the idea of forcing it on people who had laws against its use was deplored. You could blame the Chinese, as many Chinese themselves did. ‘If your people are virtuous,’ Henry Pottinger, the most unbending of Britain’s agents in China, claimed, ‘they will desist from the evil practice; and if your ...”

“... Park are the obvious example – and to historians who suspected that Britain’s secrecy laws might be hiding something important. This used to be a sensitive area. A few years ago, if you voiced this suspicion you would be called a conspiracy theorist, which was hardly helpful if you were an academic historian. But as some of these suspicions came ...”

“... a year for the poor of her parish, All Saints, Hereford, fulfilling her obligation under the Poor Laws. Parish rates were supposed to provide for the deserving poor, cutting out the need for begging, but they were rarely sufficient and older forms of informal charity remained necessary. It was usual to hand out alms of food and drink at the door, and Jeffreys ...”

“... would be one. Besides, in a society so complex that it can no longer be grasped as a whole, the laws that govern men’s and women’s behaviour are bound to be opaque to them. All the vital social processes, Marx writes, go on behind the backs of the agents involved. There is a social unconscious as well as a psychical one, which is why people can be ...”

“... Old schoolteachers will write, basking in reflected glory and taking their share of credit. The in-laws will write, implicitly retracting their former low opinion of their child’s choice. From all over the world complete strangers will write, requesting photographs and autographs and asking for validation of a totally original unified field theory that ...”

“... cannot be assimilated to that encoded on the processor of a computer, how are we to understand it? John Gurdon demonstrated in the 1970s that the nucleus of a fully differentiated adult frog cell can be ‘reprogrammed’ by transferring it into a fertilised egg from which the nucleus has been removed: embryonic development follows. The same experiment was ...”

“... in contemporary hen-house design, as if this were House and Garden rather than Farm-Poultry. John Evangelist Walsh has remarked that it was in these stories, published ten years before his first book of poems, that Frost had his first successes in capturing the flavour of real speech, voices which he later insisted poetry couldn’t do without. ‘Write ...”

“... does little to resolve. The Golden Age, the Land of Cokaygne, Joachimism, the Revelation of St John, the free-market economy, socialism and Marxism, democracy, America and the Soviet Union: these and more are all dragged into a history of what he calls ‘visions of ideal otherness’ which begins with Hesiod and ends sometime about now. Its great merit ...”

“... was common sense. Fish, ‘being highly alkalescent, wants to be qualified by Salt and Vinegar’, John Arbuthnot pronounced, but anybody could see this was fish and chips spun as science. In other ways, things were becoming much more complicated. In the 1830s and 1840s, chemists began to tabulate the elements in food. Nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and iron ...”

“... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...”

“... relations. The result would of course be a state-nation, a country defined by its institutions and laws rather than by its ethnos or imagined kinship. The only nationalism it can lay claim to will have a civic character, and political history must take the place of common descent or language. Time alone will turn such history into something like instinct, the ...”

“... Christianity when so lightly passing over the reference to the lamb of God in the Revelation of St John: ‘Come hither, I will show thee the Bride, the Lamb’s wife’ (21.9). John Boswell, in Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, sees in this metaphor ‘a hint of bestiality’ which raises problems that ‘were rarely ...”

“... English Woman’s Journal in 1858, establishing an employment register for women, agitating with John Stuart Mill for divorce and married women’s property reform, and helping to found Girton College, Cambridge. Barbara both illustrated in her own life and commented on the ironic complexities of women’s status. As Sheila Herstein points out (in a rare ...”

“... epileptics began to hide themselves from public view, or else, as in the case of Prince John, the epileptic fifth son of George V, they were hidden away by their families. The rise of eugenics made things much worse. Eugenicists fixated on epilepsy as a hereditary threat to be tackled by both negative and positive countermeasures. By 1914, 13 US ...”

“... But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his philosophical convictions, and ‘the reader whom these things do not ...”