“... their theological lineage back to a madrasa established in the town of Deoband, a hundred miles north of Delhi, in 1867. This madrasa brought together many Muslims who were not only hostile to British rule but committed to a literalist interpretation of Islam. The scholars in Deoband argued that the Quran and Sunnah (the words and deeds of the Prophet), as ...”

“... and shot their British officers; other mutinies quickly followed across the Bengal army camps of north and central India. Thanks in part to newly laid telegraph lines, the company was able to prevent mutiny from spreading in the Punjab and elsewhere; the Madras and Bombay armies also remained ‘loyal’. But it was not able to prevent the mutineers from ...”

“... taken monthly from one August to the next at Rudha Cailleach, or Witches’ Point, on the north shore of Loch Maree, you find you’re watching a mobile image, pregnant in each of its 13 stages, the more so because it alters so much as the winds and currents urge and reposition the four types of stone that compose the spit. Now it resembles the tail ...”

“... Almost every North American museum of art today includes a gallery of modern and contemporary work, and little separates the colonial furniture, the Romantic waterfall and the careworn Rodin nude from the huge splashy hieroglyph, the bold candy-striped canvas, the colossal obese sunbather and the flashing neon message ...”

“... that out there in the tropical rain-forests man could retrace his steps and begin again. In the North, such utopian communities were private ventures: and they proliferated – Oneida, New Harmony, Equality, True Inspiration. There was even one called Utopia. ‘We are all a little wild here,’ Emerson wrote to Carlyle in 1840, ‘with numberless projects ...”

“... to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For ...”

“... originally recorded’, during the phonograph boom of the Twenties. While the pioneer folklorist John Lomax remained suspicious of the new technology which made such preservation possible, his younger colleague, the composer-musicologist, Charles Seeger, took a less purist – and more activist – view of what folk music might be. Radicalised by the ...”

“... Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense ...”

“... Lever. Apart from myself, two other victims of Barbara’s midnight spleen are Roy Hattersley and John Silkin. John Silkin, a ‘failure’ at the Department of the Environment, is forgiven in a footnote because of his ‘success’ at the Ministry of Agriculture. Perhaps for once she is too generous. Because of the General ...”

“... scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women. Turn the page and the odd couple is joined by a third, for here ...”

“... was, incidentally, no less strong in Britain than in France, and the most beautiful Murillos in North America – Abraham and the Three Angels in the Canadian National Gallery and the Return of the Prodigal Son in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (the former loaned to the exhibition in New York) – were sold by Soult to the second Duke of ...”

“... municipal gardens, bent over their spades and forks in regulation red hats and green waistcoats (John Major’s father was a gnome-fancier, founding Major’s Garden Ornaments in 1930). The arrival of concrete and then plastic saw their once fine features blunted for the mass market and today’s gnome population, Twigs Way tells us in Garden Gnomes: A ...”

“... aren’t always distinguishable from those who proclaim the gospel of ‘The March of Mind’. John Elliotson, a professor at the University of London, wanted to improve the practice of medicine, but thought this could be done partly by the use of mesmerism, and was exposed in the Lancet as a fraud – or possibly a dupe – in 1838. The high-minded ...”

“... was on the point of getting betrothed when he finally premiered King Lear. (She married Dr John Hall in 1607, the year between Lear’s performance at court and its publication.) Biographers have pointed out, too, that Shakespeare had a younger brother called Edmund, who followed him to London and into the theatre business. Did Shakespeare name the ...”

“... mundane infrastructure becomes poetry. They aren’t as majestic as great masonry multi-spans like John Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge (with its demolition in the 1930s the Thames lost its finest crossing), or as Promethean in their ambitions as the great American suspension bridges, but the low curves of Maillart’s spans manage to look as if, for once, an ...”