“... products of nature rather than art. Artifice was often required to create these sensual paradises: John Evelyn, at the end of the 17th century, describes how to make what he calls a ‘Phonotactic Cylinder, or giant musical box’, which used water to produce sounds similar to birdsong (the alternative was to have an aviary). The synaesthetic delights of ...”

“... Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town perpetrating ...”

“... theories of natural law and natural rights and which centred on the political thought of John Locke. Here his arguments have encountered strong resistance, though the battle between the two positions can be unreal. James Tully’s essay tactfully demonstrates how often republican and Lockean languages complemented, rather than competed with, each ...”

“... me. I might be tempted to use words like ‘psychotic’, or ‘psychopath’, but your creator, John Banville, would understandably resent these catch-all categories, as restrictions on the subtlety, the complexity, the truth of his creation. If it is possible to get at the truth of this elaborately inventive tale. The elaboration is in the incidental ...”

“... ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or months of courtship, gift-giving and negotiation. John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk ...”

“... took him on their list (induced in the first place – let credit be given where it’s due – by John Press). He insists, and he has the right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Philip Larkin is. As some pages of Poetry and Metamorphosis make clear, the Britain that Tomlinson speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or ...”

“... haunt his college and his stories, along with the ghosts of Queen Victoria, George V, Mackenzie King and the Devil himself). He noticed that Oxford was haunted by that eerie scholar, Montague Summers, who dressed like a Mediterranean priest but was always accompanied on his afternoon walks ‘either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was supposed to be ...”

“... to see whether there might be a psychological basis for Buchan’s continual stomach trouble (like John S. Blenkiron, he had an untrustworthy duodenum), the sage pronounced: ‘Never in my experience have I met anybody less frustrated or less crippled by inhibitions. He is free from neuroses.’ There is a touch of the inhuman here, and the impression is ...”

“... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When A.C. Benson asked him what he believed ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes is famous for his private life and associations with Bloomsbury and famous, too, as the economist who campaigned for public works between the wars, and revolutionised economics with his General Theory. A biographer of Keynes has to straddle two very different worlds, and it is one measure of Robert Skidelsky’s achievement that he writes with equal authority of both in this deeply researched and densely textured book ...”

“... advocacy of slavery was undoubtedly intended as a provocation, but was not necessarily insincere. John Law of Lauriston made his own distinctive contribution to the debate, in Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Law’s panacea was a system of paper money, underwritten not by precious metals or the ...”

“... John Enoch Powell was an eminent classical scholar, as his entry in Who’s Who proclaimed: Craven Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1931; First Chancellor’s Classical Medallist; Porson Prizeman; Browne Medallist, 1932; fellow of Trinity, 1934-38; professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, 1937-39. He was 25 when he was appointed to the chair at Sydney ...”

“... critics’ hostility. So, in a sense, did White: after his second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, got even worse reviews, he abandoned experimentation. The imaginary straight author Will Wright flees to the suburbs and domesticity; the real gay author Edmund White fled to realism and domestic fiction. The literary world may have claimed to ...”

“... their builders, in whose homes window cards proclaimed: ‘This House has sent a Man to fight for King and Country.’ Those who came back from the wars were promised ‘homes for heroes’, but all too few heroes could afford to live in the sylvan recesses of Metroland, where ‘jaded vitality and taxed nerves’ were soothed away by pure air, and (as a song ...”

“... of its sort in English – means we know the 15th-century Pastons better than we know any medieval king or queen. The letters, first published in 1787, revealed a family on the make. Clement Paston, a yeoman farmer born at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son ...”