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“... detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of a book written by ...”

“... First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now that’s out of the way, onto the novels. Lanchester’s first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel ...”

“... from the Stalin Peace Prize which he had won the year before was icing on a substantial cake. John Butler is a Canterbury man and an emeritus professor at the University of Kent, best known for his book The Quest for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed ...”

“... duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded off suspicion. But the real reason this triangular relationship endured unmolested was surely that, in some crucial sense, all three principals played by the ...”

“... and fall of global empires’ is what exactly the author of such a work means by ‘empire’. John Darwin does not address this question directly. But we can reflect on it by asking two related questions. First, what is not empire, and is hence left out of this book? Second, what are the other terms that ‘empire’ comes paired with, in the usual ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... an old-fashioned family firm. The clutch of businesses incorporated in 1902 as Baldwins Ltd was a major manufacturing enterprise which gave Stanley Baldwin, like his father, a substantial metropolitan as well as provincial presence. The young Baldwin, however, grew up among books almost as much as balance sheets. His mother, who wrote poetry, novels and ...”

“... wife acquires a profitable stake in the booming Bank of America, soon to fall. But the Marvins’ major achievement is IRAT, their index of Irrational Expectations. Still keeping a reasonably modest academic lifestyle, the Marvins grow very rich indeed, especially after the Great Correction of 1987. They devote some of their wealth to the furtherance of Mrs ...”

“... helpful, could be mistaken for an angel (if he weren’t Terence Stamp, fresh from playing Troy in John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd). He understands everyone, leads them to discover their secret selves. He saves one character from suicide, turns another into an artist, and inspires another, a very rich man, to give his factory to his ...”

“... black and white. But Atget’s photographic documentation of Parisian streets and buildings is a major influence. Paris Street Scene of 1972 is one of the first pictures in which Estes used an oblique perspective, with the plate-glass windows of the shop or office in the foreground reflecting the buildings and cars on the other side of the street, which is ...”

“... wants of the master of the house, but it’s also a good question in its own right. The house is a major player in the film. It’s on Royal Avenue in Chelsea, Colin Gardner tells us in Joseph Losey (2004); the film opens with a view of Wren’s Royal Hospital at the end of the perspective, tracks down the promenade of dust that separates the two sides of the ...”

“... who you are taken to be? When and how do you assert or hide who you are? Stallworth, played by John David Washington complete with 1970s Afro, infiltrates the Klan on the telephone and with his name; a white colleague using the name does the actual hanging out with the bad guys. So ‘black’ here means imagined to be black, and the word in context needs ...”

“... behind its even-handed mistrust of all politicians was a genuine pleasure at the displacement of Major Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or ...”

“... happen and in his new essay is pleased to record that it has. Some of this work is extremely good. John Roemer’s formal reformulation of the idea of exploitation, for example; or Jon Elster’s assessment of the extent to which Marx’s models of rationality match his own; or G. A. Cohen’s schematic reconstruction of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, for ...”