“... as Asbury Park South, and the town was often referred to in debates about ‘separate but equal’ laws. Bloemink argues that Stettheimer’s painting is a ‘jubilant and celebratory’ picture of a Black community, but it’s not clear that Stettheimer was making a stand for racial equality. Was she truly ‘subversive’, as Nochlin wrote, or just ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is a science; as such, it has no opinion about religion, for sciences are based on natural laws.’ Throughout the United States, people formed Dianetics clubs and helped each other to become ‘clear’: in this state, they would be free of all compulsions, neuroses and delusions, see colours vividly for the first time, appreciate melody, perform ...”

“... wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive’ – was sent in 1987, five years before John Major announced the ‘amicable separation’ of the royal couple. The image and the attitude are a sharp reminder of the mood of the decade that saw Carter’s reputation revive. It was, appropriately, a time when monstrous females stalked the land. Diana ...”

“... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... work on behalf of the dispossessed. In London, Jones mixed with lawyers politicised by the radical John Wilkes; in Wales – no longer Yūnus Ūksfurdī but hanner Cymro, or ‘half-Welshman’ – he defended the rack-rented poor against the entrenched power of an anglicised squirearchy. His letters from the assizes towns of west Wales deplore ‘the abject ...”

“... restated in every episode during the unchanging preamble, as the portentous voice-over drones: ‘Laws are made by men, carried out by men, and men are not perfect.’ Kimble wanders around and takes the problems he comes across case by case, using insight rather than rules to sort things out. Perhaps this is something he’s learned from the injustice he ...”