“... to the messianic age. Menasseh, a rabbi at the Amsterdam synagogue, and probably a teacher of the young Spinoza, figured that the most important pre-messianic event yet to be realised was the readmission of the Jews to England, from where they had been expelled under Edward II in 1290. He argued that the prelude to the ...”

“... the Commonwealth, and Pepys was in the process of transforming himself from a humble factotum to Edward Montagu (the future Earl of Sandwich) into a Clerk of the Acts for the Navy Board – a job which could command informal payments and benefits that vastly exceeded its nominal salary of £350 a year. The diary is the product of a man who felt that both he ...”

“... of an excommunicated Catholic, buried illegally by night in the chancel of her parish church; of a young man who dressed as a woman to join in the all-female festivities that followed a birth; of horses and cats being baptised; of abortion and infanticide. Cressy is not writing history from below, however. He refers to his lower-class female culprits by their ...”

“... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...”

“... to have created a ‘classic’ Underground image and tradition: signs, a language for posters, Edward Johnston’s alphabet, Henry Beck’s diagrammatic map and so forth. All this has survived in more or less watered-down form. Even now it has been only partly upstaged by the swagger and individualism of the new Jubilee Line stations. Pick saw all this ...”

“... drunk, falls down stairs, gets sacked and never sings on the stage again, but instead enthrals the young John Major with musical evenings in their Brixton tenement. Both the cat burglar and the Jamaican have delicious girlfriends who are probably no better than they should be. The cat burglar’s girl disappeared whenever he went to jail but when he was there ...”

“... the unassuming disclaimer that he ‘is not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan’. Edward Said would have explained it as a consequence of imperial power: British travellers and writers have been drawn to South and West Asia for the same reasons French ones ventured to North Africa and the Levant. To an extent, this is surely correct: imperial ...”

“... a Monk that was believed to be by him was acquired for the Louvre. Numerous artists, including the young Manet, registered requests to copy it. Then, in the following year, the same museum bought the Réunion de portraits, a much acclaimed acquisition, of which Manet made a copy, probably later in the decade (both original and copy are in the exhibition). It ...”

“... and almost thirty thousand men sailed for the West Indies under the newly promoted Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, hero of the recent taking of Porto Bello in Panama, to capture other key Spanish possessions in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret ...”

“... the World Cup Final to take to the streets. The old Arab order was buried in Tahrir Square. Young revolutionaries rose up against a regime which for three decades had stood in the way of Palestinian aspirations. It seemed too good to be true and some pundits in Palestine wondered whether it wasn’t an American conspiracy. But it wasn’t, and ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... a lot of whisky’ before he found God. If Kavanaugh had simply said, as Bush did, ‘when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible,’ his confirmation would have been assured.)*President Trump claims that ‘China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November ...”

“... shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But O’Neill followed up. He replied to the Democratic influencer Harry Sissons: ‘I’m telling you exactly what Betas like you will be used for: food and sex.’ Fucking and devouring, or ...”

“... their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing hothead, insisting always upon relevance and social engagement, would object to being compared with Holmes. As Lewis Thomas is none of these things, he will not mind it being said that his opening paragraph is very much in Holmes’s style: ‘I ...”

“... interests of free speech his critics should stop trying to sniff out moral wrongdoing. But when Edward Moxon pulled the book, Swinburne stood firm. ‘To alter my course or mutilate my published work seems to me somewhat like deserting one’s colours,’ he told Lord Lytton. ‘One may or may not repent having enlisted, but to lay down one’s arms, except ...”