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“... in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was what went on in Cambridge. Ayer read Wittgenstein when hardly anybody else in Oxford thought of doing so. But at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and ...”

“... tallow candle to hold back the night. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Vaux-Hall’ (c.1784). For the price of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the gardens’ attraction at the time ...”

“... two of the three anonymous reviewers had been sceptical, the world’s leading papyrologist, Roger Bagnall, had pronounced the fragment genuine. King had assured Sabar that with some minor revisions the HTR would go ahead and publish, which in due course it did.Hell hath no fury like a journalist deceived. Four years later, after the text’s claims to ...”

“... not afford to let our intelligence services remain in the hands of the ‘old buffers’. If the price for that was the admission of a number of Soviet moles to the service, then, despite all the damage they did, it was a price worth paying. In fact, the reason MI5 got itself into such a disastrous mess with Kim Philby had ...”

“... of the timing of arrival for shiploads of indentured servants: these would not fetch a good price once harvest had begun. Emigration meant placing yourself and family in conditions which would be condemned outright today as hazardous to health, and were, from the deaths recorded, a real menace even on a smooth crossing. It was not in practice possible ...”

“... Hamlets-approved version. New signs, in my experience, mean trouble. Cleanliness comes with a price. ‘Safe’ neighbourhoods and restored iron railings have to be paid for with Kray-style tithes. Ecobabble underwritten with brass knuckles. Tony Lambrianou is a spokesman for this new ethic: ‘Today, if I see anyone damaging a tree, or drawing ...”

“... mainstream, main chance. Politically these are authorised versions. One of the entries, by Roger Woddis, sings of ‘The Church of Kenneth Baker’. If his church recalls the characterisation of the C of E as the Tory Party on its knees, it is Our Lady of Chequers upon whom the genuflecting is bent. Her Government’s victory with the Poll Tax ...”

“... speeches and Donny Osmond singing ‘Someone Help Me’. And, thanks to an Akai S900 sampler (cost price around £2000), the KLF’s album Chill Out includes the sound of sheep baaing. The KLF (or the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, as they were first known) was a protean project which Beadle calls ‘a new blueprint for that old warhorse “the pop ...”

“... the intellectual achievements of an age racked by continuous warfare. Mr Leyser’s account of the price of horses for warriors in Saxony is counterpointed by Dr McKitterick’s remarks on the expense of fine-quality parchment. Nevertheless, Dr McKitterick’s book is not the success that its author’s credentials might have led one to expect. Straight ...”

“... fervently as the political Left. Indeed, his view of most Conservatives of his day is more or less Roger Scruton’s view of Thatcherites: they are liberals in traditional Tory clothing, elevating liberty over order. But Communism may also have played its part in the journal’s demise, since by the close of the Marxising 1930s and with the looming of global ...”

“... and work: I was invited to speak about his time at Cambridge. The conference papers, edited by Roger Bowen, have been published, and Dr Bowen has also written an appreciative biography. Japanese studies being his subject, he is well qualified to weigh up the writings on modern Japan of Herbert Norman, a missionary’s son who grew up there. Very different ...”

“... to the pandiatonic world of Copland and his covert relationship to the European tradition of Roger Sessions and Walter Piston. To the Modernism of Copland he owed essentially nothing. He could therefore begin from the very point where both Copland and Blitzstein felt obliged to confront the social realities of the New Deal era, and hence to find ...”

“... own country. For the rest of the world, however, the book slept in obscurity, till, in 1958, Roger Caillois published a new edition of the first fourteen or so days. It created a considerable stir. The hunt for a complete text was renewed; and, this failing, René Radrizzani produced a reconstruction of it, drawing on various newly-found partial ...”

“... In adjacent fields social history has achieved surprising levels of sophistication, capped by Roger Cooter’s provocative study of phrenology as an intellectual instrument of self-help liberalism and social control (The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, 1984). But hardly any attempt has been made to apply this sort of approach to Darwinism – to ...”

“... the basis that houses administered by the National Trust are soulless. The suggestion comes from Roger Scruton, trailing his coat in the Times, but it is at least as rational as the notion that no building of any merit can be allowed to disappear. All kinds of visual expectations are reversed. Ruins are beautifully trimmed and tended (I cannot think of a ...”