“... in August 1637, aged 65, at the gate-house in Westminster where he lived his last years with a pet fox and a drunken housekeeper. His funeral was attended by ‘the greatest part of the nobilitie and gentry’, and a volume of memorial odes, Jonsonus Virbius, was published the following year. Here his disciples – the ‘Tribe of Ben’, as they were called ...”

“... Perhaps arrogantly, we suspect that people did not feel the need for a statue of Cobden or Richard Coeur de Lion, but felt that they (and, above all, that others) should feel the need. It is noteworthy that despite the concern with commemorating worthies such as King Arthur and Francis Drake in 18th-century England none of the national heroes ...”

“... pre-1789 world where a reformist Pitt the Younger faced that apparent meeting of extremes, the Fox-North coalition. ‘Nothing could be sillier than to tightlace the dead into today’s conceptual corsets,’ Porter proclaims, but, in several places, he does just that. Genuine 18th-century trends, such as the emergence of consumer capitalism, the birth of ...”

“... Louise Bourgeois is one of the two pre-eminent sculptors working today; the other is Richard Serra, whose sculpture – single-minded, monolithic, public – offers the most striking contrast to hers in both form and content. Serra is Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog exemplified in heavy metal: Louise Bourgeois is the fox, an artist of many devices, to borrow a Homeric epithet which suits her perfectly ...”

“... police to find an unburied body with its hands torn off. In the UK, this is usually the work of a fox – foxes cache their food in scattered locations, to hide it from badgers. And of course the abundance and industry of insect life vary with climate, and have a large bearing on speed of decomposition: the profile and seasonal activity of insects found in ...”

“... to mind, any more than in the comparably tragic case of another British infant, Alfie Evans, which Fox News and Breitbart, assisted by Nigel Farage, characterised as the practice of eugenics by a state-run medical service.As to the health and safety canards (conkers banned in school playgrounds, sack races banned on sports days, circus artistes required to ...”

“... Huxley) is scornfully nihilistic: ‘There was no immortality, of course. After Darwin, after the Fox sisters, after John Beavis’s own father, the surgeon, how could there be?’ Beavis’s son Anthony – Aldous, as we apprehend – is overwhelmed by the enveloping gloom: ‘He walked as though at the bottom of a moving well. Its black walls rustled all ...”

“... Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.Now aged 77, the two of them ...”

“... rise to fame, having recommended him to David Garnett, another fantasist, whose Lady into Fox had been a great success in 1922. There seems to have been a market in those years for a peculiarly English brand of fantasy, but any imputation of parochialism must fail: Garnett was a man of wide interests, who wrote poems in French as well as fantasies in ...”

“... first-person chapter about her life on the outside turning tricks out of a hotel called the Snooty Fox, then going home to her boyfriend Rodney, who beat her. Other chapters detail the fate of Betty LaFrance’s second hit man, Doc. Finally there is Gordon Hauser, a PhD dropout who teaches high-school equivalency classes at the prison. As the sole character in ...”

“... his ill-gotten gains to help keep the down-at-heel Marx family afloat. He also enjoyed a spot of fox-hunting, and as a champion of both the proletariat and the colonial Irish maintained a unity of theory and practice by taking a working-class Irish woman as his mistress. Did Marx see the victory of socialism as inevitable? He says so in The Communist ...”

“... remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an actual Kennedy TV spot, pulled from the archives, screened in the ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... speculation’. Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by ...”

“... the fascinating account of the colonisation of Barbados published in 1657 by the English agent Richard Ligon. Many planters remained nervous about bringing religion to their slaves in the 18th century. Even as some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became ...”