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“... Once primarily interested in economic history, Jonathan Israel has more recently turned his attention to the intellectual roots of Western modernity in the 18th-century Enlightenment. In the 1980s, critics on the left would have told him not to bother. During that decade the Enlightenment became a prime target in the American culture wars. Postmodernists found it masculine, universalist and Eurocentric; fiscal conservatives read its texts selectively, finding value in Locke on government, or praising the free market philosophy of Adam Smith ...”

“... an intellectually plausible lineage for the nation state. As Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob demonstrate, a particular version of history has played a major role in defining the American nation. What they call the ‘self-congratulatory national history’ of the 19th century helped to recast the experience of a few million people on ...”

“... Just the place for a snark, the Bellman said. And with equal assurance, political activists from Tom Paine to Friedrich Engels and historians from Elie Halévy to Edward Thompson have hailed 18th and 19th-century Britain as just the place for a revolution. For superficially – though only superficially – the conditions seem to have been almost ideal ...”

“... outward forms in which this genius was expressed. Work published since 1968 – notably that of Margaret Jacob – amplifies some of Manuel’s conclusions and reinforces my feeling – with which Manuel would not disagree – that many of Newton’s peculiarities can be explained in sociological terms, or in terms of his religious inheritance and of ...”

“... Lord Carrington and Norman Tebbit must be the Jacob and Esau of the Tory Party. Peter Carrington is beyond question a smooth man, and Tebbit is, if not hairy, certainly very prickly. They are also chalk and cheese politically, even though both have in their time been chairman of the Conservative Party. Lord Carrington is the scion of generations of Whigs, a man bred to the ideal of public service and in many ways an unrepentant ‘wet ...”

“... between the Schaw statutes of 1598 and Anderson’s appearance in London. His leading critic, Margaret Jacob, concedes that pre-1707 Freemasonry might have been a ‘phenomenon ... truly British avant la lettre’, but notes that the English terminology and constitutionalism of Anderson’s invented traditions were then re-exported north of the ...”

“... important books on closely related subjects: the work of Michael Hunter, for example, or that of Margaret Jacob. Some of the author’s concepts could have been defined with more rigour. Although he is aware of the problems involved in using the term ‘puritan’, this awareness is not extended to ‘latitudinarian’ – or to ...”

“... terms it carries plausibility, and the work of such historians as Rudolph Meyer, Richard Popkin, Margaret Jacob and Simon Schaffer tends broadly to support it: the bloody wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries appeared as a crisis in the authority and unity of knowledge; the thinking classes reckoned that peace could be secured and guaranteed ...”

“... anyone it can exploit to empty bedpans. I once imagined that The Children of Men was a sequel to Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), just set a few years later, and in a less benighted country. In Atwood’s novel, it’s still possible to see a pregnant woman, but she’s a ‘magic presence’, a ‘flag on a hilltop, showing us what ...”

“... the monarchical forms of political power that went with it. The new pattern was first traced by Margaret Jacob in a monograph boldly entitled The Radical Enlightenment (1981). Her aim was to discredit the old picture of unworldly Philosophes who were ‘incapable of political action’, and replace it with a roguish gallery of ‘freemasons and ...”

“... Jacob Epstein made, roughly speaking, three kinds of sculpture. There were busts and portrait heads in bronze, which pretty well everybody liked. I remember returning again and again to the photographs of them in his autobiography, particularly to the long-necked high-cheekboned girls who seemed as romantic as Picasso’s sad blue and pink people, but more substantial ...”

“... we must be grateful to scholars who have done it well. Two names spring at once to mind: those of Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, written in 1860, is still required reading on its subject; and Johan Huizinga, who wrote in Burckhardt’s shadow about the same centuries (though not the same area), and in 1919 achieved the same ...”

“... to frequent moments of absurdity. For instance, a female character in one of the poems is called Margaret, so we are told that ‘close to the time when’ (but far from the place where) Halleck wrote this poem, ‘Margaret’ was an alternative term for the ‘mollies’ (cross-dressing, man-loving men) of old ...”

“... will live in a nice house in the middle of London, but it won’t be his house. Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Arron Banks bought it for him. They own 10 Downing Street, and they own him. Amid a cascade of extreme events and consequences, we all tend to lose focus – not just the humble citizen but those charged with steering us through. Early in the ...”

“... whimsical recasting of the biblical materials. The first sentence of the book, an illustration of Margaret Jull Costa’s deft translation, strikes this note: When the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with ...”