“... puts it: ‘When you’re dead you’ll regret not having fun with your genital organs.’ And John Whitworth: Enough of solitary vice. Better to carve yourself a slice Of life, for, as the poet said, There’s fuck-all fucking when you’re dead. The 18th-century section is surprisingly thin, with Swift showing himself the master of cultivated and ...”

“... of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother John Lehmann, poet, and fructifying editor and founder of the London Magazine. Most sensitive, literate girls write out the agonies of growing up, at least in private poetry or prose. But from such a family as Rosamond Lehmann’s, one writes to publish. In an ...”

“... to yourself,’ in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic ...”

“... New Zealand stamp had gone missing. I would like to think the story begins on New Zealand’s North Island one day in the late 1890s. One of Wellington’s early stamp designers, J. Gaut, is looking in a southeasterly direction across the blue expanse of Lake Taupo at a large volcanic crater out of which rise the snow-clad peaks of Mount Ruapehu, an ...”

“... coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female line a senior claim ...”

“... encounter, which outraged most Black leaders and seems to have inspired racial violence in the North, as a calculated performance to prepare conservative whites for the coming announcement of emancipation.Once he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January, 1863, Lincoln’s racial views underwent rapid evolution. Unfortunately, while devoting a ...”

“... Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ancient sources. Its philosophical base was Neoplatonic and ...”

“... Alan Bristow, a helicopter tycoon who had done very well out of flying people to and from the North Sea oil rigs (and by curbing trade unions), made a bid and then withdrew it. By the early summer it looked as though Westlands would go bust. Good riddance, as far as the Government was concerned. When Westland workers or management lobbied the Government ...”

“... and the narrator run a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister; both are married to a man called John). The book is a composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ...”

“... natural-history keeper staged annual cremations of Sloane’s decaying entomological specimens. John Cannon, an eminent plant taxonomist, reveals that after contemplating Sloane’s herbarium ‘one is left with a slight nagging feeling of anti-climax’ because the collector had the misfortune to live just before taxonomy became a proper science with ...”

“... high modernism of the interwar years, as introduced by émigrés from fascist Germany, is inner North-West London: the borough of Camden, and to a lesser extent Westminster, Barnet and Brent, with Hampstead and Highgate at the epicentre. It is here that you can find the major buildings of Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton, the houses of Connell, Ward and ...”

“... his apprenticeship without mishap in 1761. By 1767 he was in partnership with another bookseller, John Payne, in premises in Paternoster-row by St Paul’s Churchyard, ‘the centre of bookselling’, and he was to settle in the capital for the rest of his life. The profession of bookseller was at that time a capacious one. Johnson not only sold books but ...”

“... about. Yesterday’s bourgeois media correspondent becomes today’s revolutionary press officer. John Reed was not the first or the last journalist to follow this trajectory. But he remains the most spectacular. He went to report Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, made straight for the Petrograd Bolsheviks and became a denizen of the seething ...”

“... and traders lay behind the Roman excesses, and took its toll: lions effectively disappeared from North Africa, tigers and elephants from Persia and the rest of Western Asia. The Old Testament launched the Judaeo-Christian tradition on a different course that was equally unfortunate. The notion that God had given humanity ‘dominion’ over the beasts has ...”

“... bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in ...”