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“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”

“... of ‘the delicious surplus of life’. Lamb’s own definition is thata pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the ...”

“... He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like John Gould (who reciprocated by christening a new rhea darwinii after him). Darwin modelled his Zoology on Humboldt’s Zoologie, acting as taskmaster and paymaster chivvying a Gradgrind work-force. Not that he was incapable of such work himself. Although in ...”

“... addresses his girlfriend as Angel Drawers. In other words, he’s a cross between Keith Talent and John Self, a London yob whose conflict with the South American wilds is bound to produce much mirthful copy and rich scope for fatso-baiting. Stockton certainly lives up to his role, screaming for tomato ketchup in the middle of nowhere, sulking in his ...”

“... to national character were largely an aspect of political abuse – a view spelled out in one of John Stuart Mill’s earliest essays in the Westminster Review and defended all his life. Professor Deane is equally scrupulous about distinguishing one antipathy and its objects from another. In the early stages of the Revolution, émigré priests were made much ...”

“... Right. In an age of global conglomerates, Leadbeater argues, there is no need for antitrust laws because the invisible hand of the market will brush aside all cartels. He rightly notes the difficulty of extracting money from the plutocracy, but then recommends making up the shortfall by regressive taxation, rather than the one charge the rich can’t ...”

“... Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a payment of ...”

“... of the procedure. In England the subject took off when it was enthusiastically sponsored by Dr John Elliotson of University College London. He welcomed it not only as an extraordinary new therapy, but as something that could throw light on psychology and pathology, even on the very nature of the vital principle. Mesmer’s claim that there was a magnetic ...”

“... the precociously capable Eric Idle, President in 1965, finally managed to repeal the exclusion laws. Germaine Greer duly became the first woman elected, playing Gertrude Lawrence in a Noel-Gertie colloquy featuring the present writer as Noel. (As you might imagine, she stood out from the cast.) Before that, such an inventive woman as Eleanor Bron had to be ...”

“... of Artificial Intelligence, in which Hofstadter takes a line which tackles both the objections of John Searle to the very proposition of machine-based intelligence and the claims of Herbert Simon that such an intelligence is already emerging. But there are many other topics, which take him well beyond the terrain of the earlier books. Some of these seem to me ...”

“... redefining science on their own terms, enlarging the prevailing definition of nature and natural laws to include a reality beyond matter. It is here that some of the most eminent scientists of the day enter the story. No preceding historian of Victorian thought has, I think, realised as Janet Oppenheim does the extent to which spiritualism and psychical ...”

“... people. The Party is decent too. It accepts that ‘defining rights and freedoms by negative laws and procedural remedies’ will no longer do. It wants to introduce a Bill of Rights to fit with the European Convention. It also wants more access to government information and a licence to inspect any information – any information? – about oneself. It ...”

“... how rules on uncleanness help define a people and keep it together – and apart (Jewish dietary laws being an outstanding success story). These themes recur in Implicit Meanings, even down to the English Sunday midday meal that she calls lunch but a majority calls dinner, a distinction which with its different menus itself helps unite and separate. Then ...”

“... population could find its salvation, not in Chartism or strikes or demonstrations against the Corn Laws, but in fealty to those benevolent knights of the counting house whom he dubbed ‘Captains of Industry’. Later, the nation’s conviction that it was charged with a chivalric mission throughout the world, especially in what we now call the Third ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”