“... and Superman were bought in 1949. These were followed by Dante, The Greeks by Kitto, Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire, Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, all the way to Sophocles and Rousseau in 1953. A very European selection. Also on the shelf is Three to Get Married, by Bishop Sheen. I thought this was about a ménage à trois, but the third turned out to be ...”

“... in America had the desired effect. Positive reviews appeared in the French press, and, from John Stuart Mill, in the London Review. The doors to Parisian salons were now open, but Tocqueville soon found himself exhausted by the engagements of literary society, which he considered a distraction from his political and philosophical ambitions. A first attempt ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... and Engels wrote, ‘in Saint-Just’s illusion. On the day of his execution he saw hanging in the Hall of the Conciergerie the great tables of the Rights of Man, and with pride and self-esteem declared: “After all, it was I who did that.” But those tables proclaimed the rights of a man who could no more be the man of ancient society than his ...”

“... on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the memorial meeting in Conway Hall there is Nick Garnham, ‘elegant, intelligent, disdainful Wykehamist’. Earlier, at the Garden House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not ...”

“... somewhat belatedly, they did Leslie Stephen. (He eventually resigned his fellowship at Trinity Hall, and we now learn that he may have been brought near to suicide.) Not that life was always so thrilling; Stephen, in fact, found Cambridge dull. ‘The only persons I thoroughly liked were Jebb the public orator and Mrs Jebb,’ he wrote later: ‘but Mrs ...”

“... fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the ...”

“... rationality naturally casts infancy as a state in which something is lacking – as when John Stuart Mill in On Liberty writes in exasperation of the ‘mere children’ to which a stupid society reduces its adult population. But, on the other hand, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the other great Romantics, to whom Victorian intellectuals such as Mill were ...”

“... Revolution of twenty years before had united England, but divided Scotland and Ireland. The exiled Stuart monarchy was still influential, and its supporters knew very well that one essential purpose of Union was to keep it in exile. Anon-state institution, the Presbyterian Kirk, enjoyed something of the prestige normally given to parliaments. But, although ...”

“... brother grew up in a semi-detached house on the southern edge of Glasgow, with their parents, Stuart, a data analyst, and Linda, a nurse turned government adviser. One cold November evening, I sat with Linda in a shelter at the top of her garden looking out towards Ben Lomond. She told me about her daughter, who loved her friends, her golden ...”

“... English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its original with many laughs. In_Doctor Criminale, the issue is more pointed. The narrative contains a series of prominent and very ...”

“... first. On 4 February 1658, seven months before his death, he arrived unannounced at Westminster Hall in a hackney carriage – the Thames was icebound – and told his startled son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, that he intended to dissolve Parliament. Think hard about it first, Fleetwood pleaded, for it is a decision of great consequence. ‘You are a ...”

“... great houses. Protestants across Europe also detested and feared Jesuit success. Tudor and early Stuart England led the way in inflicting barbarous deaths on Jesuit missionaries; the archetypal martyr was the spirited and multitalented former Oxford don Edmund Campion. Before he converted from Protestantism, he had mightily impressed Queen Elizabeth with his ...”

“... architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder and ...”

“... for epilepsy was particularly insisted on; and Shakespeare’s own son-in-law, the physician John Hall, records its use in a ‘fume’ to be inhaled at the onset of a fit. No wonder, then, that in Othello Desdemona seeks to bind her epileptic husband’s head with a handkerchief that, we later learn, was ‘dyed in mummy’ by the Egyptian sorceress who ...”