“... and colleagues seem to have treated him as a guru, compelled by his ‘holiness’. Yet Lyndall Gordon suggests that later in life, visited by moods in which evil seemed everywhere, T.S. Eliot sometimes suspected the man he too had once thought holy was in fact diabolic. Reading Williams, you can sometimes see what Eliot meant. Williams seems to believe in ...”

“... they protect, it could be a forerunner to the far more radical global tax on capital proposed by Thomas Piketty as a way to ease the extremes of inequality built into the capitalist system. The idea goes back at least to Keynes. But the fact modern supporters chose to name it after the legendary hero of Sherwood Forest is a marker of how popular thinking ...”

“... narrative. She summons back into the annals of the wars the ‘taciturn’ figures the composer Thomas Haswell remembered on the Tyneside of his youth: ‘the sea-dogs of Camperdown, of the Nile, of Trafalgar … in every state of picturesque dismemberment – one arm, one leg, one arm and one leg, or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs’. Uglow ...”

“... created an eerie production of Ghosts with designs by Edvard Munch. The British director Edward Gordon Craig dreamed up stylised productions of several Ibsen plays. It was Ibsen’s ambivalence that made his plays so adaptable. He was an autodidact who remained wary of abstract debates and positions; he was divided and uncertain about most of the aesthetic ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the ...”

“... less than three hours later. All of the women survived. Most of the men would die as gentlemen. Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, inspected the damage soon after the collision, told Captain Smith that it was mathematically impossible for the Titanic to stay afloat for much more than two hours, and then quietly awaited his death after helping people ...”

“... impressed by Harrington’s acknowledgment of his debt to that profound enemy of republicanism, Thomas Hobbes, and to have noticed the purposes which, for all their obvious disagreements, Hobbes and Harrington shared. Hobbes is the subject of two strong essays. Quentin Skinner follows the erratic development of his attitude to the Classical tradition which ...”

“... the damage done by this quasiacademic dining club when figures such as Lord Halifax and Cosmo Gordon Lang, both fellows during the Thirties, used the High Table as a place to discuss and plot their disgraceful foreign policy. The dry-as-dusts and the clubmen were able to unite against Rowse, not only ejecting him from the chance of the Wardenship, but ...”

“... cantata, suffers by comparison with Britten’s Spring Symphony, which set some of the same Thomas Nashe poetry a decade and a half later; and while the comparison may be unfair, it is revealing. Britten’s genius lay in the precise capture of verbal imagery and sonority in striking musical ideas. Sequence and balance mattered more to him than ...”

“... environment than ours. Peter was, I think, a political scientist; there were early editions of Thomas Hobbes on the shelves. Ilse typed up John Beaglehole’s edition of Cook’s journals. Only occasionally did my father seem to feel that the refugees might have been a little impatient with provincial life in the South Pacific. My friend Graham Percy (who ...”

“... something else, a postcard sent in August 1915 by my father’s uncle, Brigadier-General Gordon Geddes RFA, to his brother-in-law, telling him that Bob had arrived safely. I discovered, online, that Geddes kept a war ‘diary’, which was (with some 150 others) housed at the Royal Artillery archives in Woolwich. My great-uncle was in France from ...”

“... as citizens, could not be held to have violated their allegiance by rebellion.In 1781 Lord George Gordon stood trial in London for treason, having provoked anti-Catholic riots in the course of which the townhouse of the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, had been burned down (a personal interest that appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield accepted ...”

“... the jaws of defeat, to elevate triumphs of character above hard-headed victories (the ‘General Gordon syndrome’), and to indulge in le vice anglais (pleasure in being beaten at sport). Even Suez seemed awful, not so much because it was a failure of arms, but because Eden’s actions were sensed to be duplicitous and therefore a blot on England’s ...”

“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... existence on the plateau Selous was prepared to deny. Singing in that language, the extraordinary Thomas Maphumo has established a world-wide reputation with a musical style that melds a traditional Shona instrument, the mbira, and its bubbling rhythm with influences from rock, soul and reggae – and with political protest. Zimbabwe has horrendous economic ...”