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“... And there also emerged the self-employed ‘thief-catcher’ – the most celebrated was Jonathan Wild, immortalised by Fielding. Such self-appointed sleuths cashed in on the lavish Parliamentary rewards newly offered for those bringing successful prosecutions. With a thief-catcher clearing up to £140 per case – far more than an artisan’s annual ...”

“... grabbed Foote’s pistol and locked it in his desk. Less fortunate was the Democratic congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine, killed in a duel by his colleague William Graves of Kentucky in 1838. As Freeman relates, this confrontation, which no one really wanted to take place, originated with some innocuous comments on the House floor about corruption in the ...”

“... in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of anxiety, brought on by the growing strength of Germany and the sense that France had lost its way. The year was 1890; the smart of the Franco-Prussian War was still palpable; the Dreyfus Affair, which ...”

“... intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to Congress and put it to a vote. At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of ...”

“... names of the Marlowes’ neighbours as if he were doffing his cap to them in the street: Alderman Rose the woollen-draper; Harmon Verson the immigrant glazier; Laurence Applegate the tailor, who spoke ‘bawdy words’ about Mistress Hurt; Goodman Shaw the basketmaker, into whose house John Marlowe stormed one evening in 1579 and said, ‘Michael Shaw thou ...”

“... to reinstate the English Revolution as a branch of the Thirty Years War is sometimes extravagant, Jonathan Scott has a point when he argues that the true context of the Stuart crisis was not British but European, in the sense that Continental interference, climaxing in the Dutch invasion in 1688-9, clinched a process of state-formation which the civil wars ...”

“... robs us of Nigel Nicolson on Alexander, A.J.P. Taylor on Beaverbrook, Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Jonathan Dimbleby on his father, John Pearson on Ian Fleming, P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes ...”

“... proposition as it is an old satirical move, going back at least as far as The Beggar’s Opera and Jonathan Wild. The satirist affects not to see the difference between criminals and respectable people, and we are supposed to wonder if the difference is as secure as we thought. The same move, although less satirical and more romantic in mood, structures most ...”

“... School of Art, was sent out under the name Jacob Morrow: romantic thrillers with titles like Rose of Rubies (serialised in the Portsmouth News), Here Is Murder, The Black Scarab. In December 1929, Jacob Morrow won fourth prize in a short-story competition run by the Hampshire Telegraph. Soon afterwards, she began to sign her work O.M. Manning, but it was ...”

“... anatomy of the brain?’ ‘Not very much.’ ‘Yes, it would take a very long time.’ Aristide rose and walked over to his desk, and picked up a plastic, grapefruit-size model of the brain – one of the few things on it. Then he sat down again across from me and pulled the model apart to show me the corpus callosum, which, he said, processes everything ...”

“... V.S. Naipaul, who hated having to teach creative writing in Uganda but was still short of money. Jonathan Raban taught at Smith College in the early 1970s but loathed it. ‘Never again,’ he said, no matter the money. A number of writers, Anthony Thwaite among them, taught in Kuwait or the desert emirates and had stories of segregated classrooms and ...”

“... Europe’s most open and prosperous societies. This fascinating world has been brought to life by Jonathan Israel’s great study, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (2001). But Israel isn’t mentioned in Multitude’s extensive notes. Hardt and Negri’s concern is with rebirth, not historiography. It is the great seer who appeals ...”

“... such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in 1910, the year he ...”

“... is a price you must pay for some victory over and above Pearse And Connolly and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is ...”

“... third in the medals table, behind China and the US. Andy Murray won the US Open in tennis. Justin Rose won it in golf. This summer, Murray won Wimbledon and Chris Froome followed Wiggins to victory in the Tour de France. The cup ran over. There’s plenty of material for a different story, too. Woodward followed his world cup triumph with a poor Six Nations ...”