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“... case that Groebner cites to support his claim: David Reuveni, calling himself the brother of King Joseph of Habor, the ruler of some of the Lost Tribes of Israel, came to Rome as his brother’s messenger in 1524 and promised an army of Jewish warriors to join with Christians in a final battle against the Turks. He arrived at the house of Cardinal Egidio di ...”

“... thighs and remarkably elastic anatomy, than among portraits or specimens of natural history (the John Dory, a monkey, a dromedary).Having established the distinction between Olympian poetry and quotidian prose, he obtained startling effects by allowing elements of one mode to cross into another: he gave his antique heroes the huge moustaches of contemporary ...”

“... and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor ...”

“... so calls attention, once again, to a secret subtext. When Solkin, in Painting for Money, discussed Joseph Wright’s painting of a group of students drawing a plaster cast of Venus with a single breast exposed, Paulson in his review announced that she, too, was a version of the goddess of Nature, Diana Multimammia. ‘Solkin does not see this,’ he ...”

“... a Faraday with unswerving theoretical conceptions of the world derived ultimately from Roger Joseph Boscovich, a Jesuit natural philosopher of the 18th century who had described the workings of nature not in terms of material atoms but of attractive and repulsive forces emanating from non-material centres. In an age of concern about the public ...”

“... that had been central to devotional behaviour for thousands of years came to appear grotesque. Joseph Farrell observes that the practice of duelling is now similarly ‘uniformly judged as outlandish and incomprehensible’, its ‘canons and creeds … as beyond recall as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians’. For five hundred years men of a certain ...”

“... acts, and whose character is shrouded by an almost painful formality? It’s no surprise that Joseph Ellis should now venture an answer to this question, having already produced biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as a book about the 1790s, Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in ...”

“... reggae music, multi-media happenings, what have you. But bless me, it seems I was wrong. For if John Gross isn’t duplicating for a later generation what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such ...”

“... time himself) and Despair, both appeared here in 1936–7 on the list of the Hutchinson-owned John Long, where, writes the betrayed novelist, who has presumably been copytasting the books issuing from that too genteel imprint, Despair can only have stood out ‘like a rhinoceros in a world of humming birds’. These are promisingly sane, resolute letters ...”

“... a fascination, when he was a small boy. At the age of 11, having moved to Grenoble, he got to meet Joseph Fourier – the mathematical Fourier, not the interestingly deranged phalansterist – who had been a leader on the Egyptian expedition and had since become the local prefect. According to The Keys of Egypt, Fourier showed him the hieroglyphic inscriptions ...”

“... became known as the ‘Slade cropheads’. They wore baggy smock dresses modelled on Augustus John’s gypsy drawings and found themselves written about – in both admiring and satirical terms – in the college magazine. For all her later fame in the close orbit of the Bloomsbury set, Carrington had a modest upbringing as the daughter of a railway ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a ...”

“... have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account of this mostly painful career; and not everybody will be put off by Mr Tennant’s not saying ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”