“... greatest figure ever to adorn the international capital markets, greater even than J.P. Morgan and Michael Milken in their primes. At a dinner in 1834, someone expressed the hope that the Rothschild children were not too attached to money and business: the rentier cast of mind had already set by this period. Nathan answered: I wish them to give mind, and ...”

“... angrily that he was no such thing. Harold Wilson, the new Labour Prime Minister, denounced the young MP from Smethwick as a ‘Parliamentary leper’, and before long Griffiths was drowned in the full Labour tide of 1966. But even before the 1966 election, the Labour Party had turned the retreat at Smethwick into a rout. Further controls on Commonwealth ...”

“... conscious’, are uncannily prefigured by those of Macintosh, the master of the computers in Michael Frayn’s novel The Tin Men, published thirty-some years ago. Macintosh is programming his computers to pray – automated devotion, he calls it – which the machine will do better than man: ‘It wouldn’t pray for things it oughtn’t to pray for, and ...”

“... standards of 1889’) and at 14 became a foundation member of the Left Book Club. By 16 he was a Young Communist and soon found the intellectual discipline of Marxism ‘irresistible’. He did all the Left things. When Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact he saw the Soviet action as ‘sensible, logically defensible and indeed ...”

“... and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, but by 1995 it had generated such florid productions as Michael Ryan’s memoir of sex-addiction, Secret Life, which included a confession even of his inappropriate intimacy with his dog, Topsy. In January 1997, when Moore’s story came out, the publishing world was bracing itself for Kathryn Harrison’s The ...”

“... of the ‘English spirit’ and would therefore counteract the notion that ‘the minds of young women are becoming unEnglish.’ At Oxford there was little support for English studies, but in 1873 English was included in the examinations for a Pass Degree. After a public campaign during the 1880s, a final Honours School of English Language and ...”

“... impervious to Nicky’s homo-erotic appeal: if he has a temptation, it seems to be a matter of young girls. After this clergyman’s mysterious death, Nicky (who is only 16) is taken into the household of a policeman and his wife: they teach him a more healthy way of life, with bird-watching and sensible food. Will Nicky try to seduce either of them? Will ...”

“... through. In one of my ration I found the baptism, on 14 December 1640, of Eaffry Johnson at St Michael’s in Harbledown, a village half a mile outside Canterbury towards which I sometimes feel the fates nudging me, since I had already visited it in the course of Michael Levey’s research for his biography of Walter ...”

“... of snakes; most illegitimate bites are to the arms and upper body (the victims are usually young men with a point to prove), while most accidental bites are to the legs and feet. The mortality rate has fallen considerably over the past half century, with the more widespread availability of anti-venoms and the decline in snake numbers as a result of ...”

“... the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer Anthony Hunt and the young Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, who were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of ...”

“... a modern world that has nonetheless still to solve many of the riddles it set out to explore. As Michael Ermarth, the editor of the last two volumes of Jaspers’s Great Philosophers, acknowledged a decade ago, ‘there can be no “Jasperism” or doctrinal edifice built on his thinking. As with Socrates, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, his real message is ...”

“... he alternately calls ‘public opinion’ or politics ‘out-of-doors’. Like a number of other young historians, such as Michael Braddick and Phil Withington, he believes that even a divine-right absolute monarchy rested on the consent of the governed. Previous generations of scholars took that consent to be implicit and ...”

“... with paintings like The Luncheon in mind, we might suppose he was setting aside in quotes. Michael Fried summarised the issue in a resounding formula: Manet’s art represents the last attempt in Western painting to achieve a full equivalent to the great realistic painting of the past … To paint his world with the same fullness of response, the same ...”

“... of France died, leaving three sons. But none of them reigned for more than a few years, each dying young. His daughter Isabella, however, married Edward II of England, and they had a son who became Edward III. That was Edward’s claim to the throne of France, by right: Dieu et mon droit, as the royal motto still declares. But it was the son of Philip’s ...”

“... clarity. Written in the aftermath of her affair with the Abstract Expressionist painter Michael Goldberg, it is also the anatomy of a failed relationship, unravelling painfully over ten scenes of exquisitely eloquent monologues and skilfully charged interchanges between a triangle of characters with pastoral names: Damon, Chloris and ...”