“... as a popular variation on what would come to be the essential themes of Enlightenment thought. Daniel Defoe compared the pirate settlers of Madagascar to the founders of Rome, and Montesquieu claimed that the Greeks, too, were originally pirates; Graeber suggests that tales of pirate politics would have been well known to many writers and thinkers of the ...”

“... as well as objects, as when we say that the bridge collapsed because of the explosion, or that Smith went to the shops because it occurred to her that she needed some milk. That is, we routinely include mental and physical events in our ontology. Secondly, and only slightly less obviously, we allow that there can be different instances of the same general ...”

“... to an audience of fifty at the Kensington home of Lord and Lady Glenconner on the poetry of Arnaut Daniel, but the one Marinetti was due to give to an audience of five hundred at the Bechstein Hall on Futurism. ‘“Futurist” Leader in London,’ reported the Daily Chronicle, ‘Makes an Attack on the English Nation.’ If you can’t beat them, join them ...”

“... in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced ...”

“... should call; though the Parliament should call, or though the whole Nation should call. When Daniel Defoe, the world’s first great financial journalist, wrote these words in 1706, only a decade had passed since the establishment of modern credit-based capitalism, with the foundation of the Bank of England and the creation of the National Debt. He could ...”

“... of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What they had in common wasn’t just ...”

“... with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and another on the ‘black experience’ of Empire by Philip Morgan. But broadly speaking, the radical historians of Empire – David Killingray, Peter Sluglett, Nicholas Tarling – have been confined to the final, historiographical ...”

“... how cloudy it was or how sunny, which mode of transport he used, what magazines he bought in W.H. Smith. But the point is well made when he writes: British politics in the 1970s, for all the Gothic prose it usually prompts, was about moments of possibility as well as periods of entropy; about stretches of calm as well as sudden calamity. Politics was rawer ...”

“... of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics institutes open first in Glasgow, and then in London. Phrenology infiltrates England ‘via Scotland’. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802 by a group of Scottish Whigs, together with the Quarterly Review published ...”

“... Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had ...”

“... it seems to have been a happy marriage, producing two children, the younger of whom is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The end of the 1940s also saw the end of his best poetry. The speaking engagements and committee memberships that increasingly took up the last two decades of his life may have been, in their way, expressions of what Stanford calls ‘his ...”

“... view of the period. He might also have marked those optimistic economists such as Adam Smith, who remarked in The Wealth of Nations on ‘the universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. Britain around this time is portrayed by Gatrell as a chronically unsettled country. There had been two hundred sedition trials in ...”

“... poor writing; a not untypical example: ‘around the mid-19th century when dialect emerged’. Daniel Rosenberg on Home Tooke makes interesting connections back to Locke and forward to de Man but neglects Bentham. Roy Porter on the language of sickness in Georgian England could usefully have been longer and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could ...”

“... the digestive process of an immense worm.’ In Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War, Daniel Swift writes about the strangeness of Jarrell’s war: ‘No one was ever so far from the war as Randall Jarrell, deep in Texas.’ He started training as a pilot. ‘Flying is pretty dull,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, ‘and I’m bad at it.’ At the ...”