“... paupers in the country would long ago have been under my management.’ Himmelfarb’s studies of Darwin, Disraeli, Bentham and Blackstone may be read primarily as essays in historical revisionism: though all have implications for wider moral theory, it would be possible to view them as merely academic. A less clinical and more contentious note is struck by ...”

“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... there, he draws attention in passing to similarities between the views of Lucretius and those of Darwin, of the Epicurean atomist and the Victorian ‘transformationist’. What was mainly wrong with atomism for Bergson was its belief that the total number of atoms of which the cosmos is made is fixed, so that all that happens over time is that the stock is ...”

“... Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome, Koestler sought to establish himself as a new Darwin, a scientific revolutionary of the atomic age. Urging him on in this foolhardy ambition, which he had neither the learning nor the originality to realise, was not only his inveterate hunger for fame and intellectual respectability, but a genuine desire to ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... style at all. He did not believe in ultimate Truth, but he had no doubt that Galileo, Newton and Darwin had put together some amazing packages of words and techniques which – unlike Descartes’s concept of Mind – had served many of our purposes very well. It was scientism that Rorty deplored, not science. Another theme that tripped up readers of the ...”

“... rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded his lectures with a resigned ‘God help you all.’ When John Phillips Potter nicked his knuckle anatomising – at the dead man’s request – the circus performer the ‘Gnome Fly’, he swiftly ...”

“... animal development found evidence of physiology transformed by environment and thereby anticipated Darwin by fully a century. Projects for linguistic improvement testified to man’s capacity to reshape the means by which he communicated and refined his intentions. Above all, interest in spreading the gospel of betterment, not merely through schooling but also ...”

“... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over a much longer ...”

“... more gentlemanly than that. Ritualised animal contests were not known before the 20th century. If Darwin had known of it, we can be quite sure that, with his interest in animal analogies of human morality, he would have greedily transcribed it into The Descent of Man. But the several sections of that work which are concerned with the ‘law of ...”

“... in order to save money. A strange coalition came to its rescue: the horticultural entrepreneurs John Loudon and George Glenny; the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire; Radical politicians, including Joseph Hume; and Sir William Hooker and John Lindley, the foremost botanists of the age. They won in 1840, when Kew passed from ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... controversy provoked at home by the Indian Mutiny seven years earlier had been about Charles John Canning’s attempts as governor-general to rein back the brutality of the military reprisals. A slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831, seven years before formal emancipation, had been visited with hundreds of executions, albeit after some form of trial, without ...”

“... Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the House of Representatives was delivered while he was secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe. A sceptic ...”