“... lived separate from them in the house of their guardian, but was faithfully kept in touch with by John: who here writes cheerfully promising to get his sister anything she would like, barring ‘livestock’ – always better and more kindly left in its natural environment: – though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome Globe of gold-fish ...”

“... darkest, he concluded, between 1550 and 1849. According to one estimate, when Henry VIII became king in 1509 there were 139 vineyards in England and Wales, all on the verge of steep decline. The impact of lower temperatures was felt across the northern hemisphere. Farmers in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, for instance, found they could no longer grow ...”

“... when this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands.16 April. A card from Tom King with news of the tattoo of me that he had put on his arm (pictured in the Diary published in the LRB of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most notorious radio traitor of all, and many British people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of ...”

“... Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic (pigment ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... of his research attacks the familiar claim that heavy internet use makes people more isolated. John Freeman’s polemic The Tyranny of Email cites a study that purports to show how ‘people burned up two hours a day on the internet’ that ‘they would normally spend with family and friends,’ but Watkins finds that young people’s internet use just ...”

“... to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us. Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But ...”

“... black magic or witchcraft. At best, it was evidence of a wicked character. (Kent to Oswald in King Lear: ‘A plague upon your epileptic visage!’) But there has probably never been a worse time in history to have epilepsy than the century beginning around 1850. At that time, a noxious stew of pseudoscientific, Social Darwinist ideas linked the condition ...”

“... suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... here as he does in the occasional “Charge of the Light Brigade” and the mythic Idylls of the King: by transforming the sacrifices of war into musical offerings.’ If that were really the case, we might come to the point of asking what the point was of reading Tennyson at all. Tucker’s motto might have been taken from Browning’s preface to Sordello ...”

“... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...”