“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... would later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted ...”

“... a plateful of corpses, embryos and fluid from mammary glands, who wouldn’t baulk? But there’s more to this recoil of Josie’s than just calling things by their proper names. There’s more to it, too, than a fear of flab. Josie reacts to food as an ascetic – St Thomas Aquinas, let ...”

“... groups, and others, are reported from time to time, the ‘Movement’ which the writers knew is more or less moribund: its members are living in the West, or have been exiled to Siberia, or are in jail, or are dead (some of them, like Yuri Galanskov having died in jail), or have simply fallen silent. And no wonder, when the price of dissent or protest is as ...”

“... takeovers, the Latin American drug trade, the troubles of the International Tin Council and five more glorious years of Thatcherism are all somehow part of the Same Thing. But are they? The play itself kicks off with a prelude from Thomas Shadwell’s The Volunteers, or the Stockjobbers of 1692 (‘Look ye Brethren, hye ye ...”

“... look provincial. Tudor patrons weren’t generally prepared to pay much for pictures, and were more concerned with the documentary function of a painting, its cost and size, than with its aesthetic qualities. A proclamation of 1563 recommended that London painters be paid less than carpenters and goldsmiths. Much of the labour was done in workshops by ...”

“... at various points on a periegesis around the route of the Berlin Wall. To make Queneau’s form more wall-like Terry fattens out its slender middle, so the quennet becomes a series of long horizontal lines:Whiteness of the border walls: to facilitate shooting.Electronic devices. Original searchlight.          Directing centre. Panoramic view.A lot ...”

“... had its budget cut since 2010, forcing it to let staff go; those who remain now have to manage more than double the workload. In March, Glyn Maddocks, special adviser to the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice, warned that ‘the risk of wrongful conviction is at least as great today as it was in the bad old days of the 1970s and ...”

“... corner on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his rich employer’s daughter; Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King Oliver’; and the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, which was a notable ...”

“... of toothache believed in by many and various cultures, and arguably the larval form of our much more benign tooth fairy. Extraction technique from Jean-Baptiste Bourgery’s ‘Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme’ Children’s dental pain may still be alleviated by a coin substituted for a tooth under a pillow, but for adults in the early ...”

“... inviting them to leave a message. The Guardian asserted that the News of the World, ‘thirsty for more information from more voicemails’, had deleted messages to make room for new ones. Mistake number two: the deletions were automatic. But the suggestion that the NoW’s grubby hacks had manipulated Milly’s voice to ...”

“... to vertical, composing a message. It looks like a giant toy, but it also pays homage to a more distant predecessor: George Murray’s shutter semaphore system, invented in 1795, which allowed information to be sent at great speed (London could contact Portsmouth in just seven and a half minutes). A panel next to Pica’s semaphore provides the ...”

“... representational skill and – in England at least – the most marketable. It was a gift which Thomas Gainsborough showed early; in one account, so impressing a friend of his mother’s when he was still a boy that his father was persuaded he should go to London for instruction. But this talent wasn’t necessarily combined with other painterly ...”

“... hand ‘so we might have some conception of the amount of genius that slavery is murdering’. But Thomas Jefferson compared her to a parrot and thought her poems ‘below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of The Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.’ In a context where figures including Kant and Hume used aesthetics to confirm racist ...”

“... throughout his career, it was Trevor-Roper’s patrician anticlericalism which distinguished his more progressive – because freethinking – brand of conservatism from what he perceived as the type of right-wingery that might lapse all too easily into a fascistic authoritarianism. Trevor-Roper’s very individual and historically informed reading of ...”