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“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please ...”

“... water or filled the place with holiday bungalows. There had been no consumerism or television to foster aberrant desires, no immigration to pollute the village’s ancestral stock, no metrication to confound the valley’s innate sense of measure, no welfare state to homogenise its community and weaken the character of its villagers. No liberal progressives ...”

“... any definition.’ Newton is enlisted into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As Rousseau extends his list to include Burke, Smollett, Cleland and Horace ...”

“... real Pig Islander’. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in ...”

“... course of the week. The majority’s loyalties remained with the Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving ...”

“... seas; the Clashing Rocks crush rash explorers. Natural conservatism and the passion for authority foster an acceptance of tradition, however grotesque. Ultimately non-tenable theories, above all that of the geocentric universe, attract too great a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not ...”

“... at home and for military defeat abroad. In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist ...”

“... is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just writers at work on our ...”

“... the younger ones get a better deal.’ But it seems that the children may have to be brought up in foster homes, and perhaps theirs isn’t the most enviable situation. One of the women describes her son’s reactions of severe shock on discovering what his mother’s job was when he was 13. Rewards: quite apart from money, from the tangle of things that make ...”

“... demographic, criminal, medical – gathered for large populations. Eighteenth-century writers like John Arbuthnot and Johann Süssmilch had chalked up the remarkable stability of the ratio of girl-to-boy babies born each year to divine providence, but to the judicial statisticians of the early 19th century it seemed less clear what interest God might have in ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... customers actually mistook them for women, an illusion that the whore himself could foster by a deft substitution of orifices. Prostitutes rarely undressed, permitting penetration through strategic slits in their knickers. Dragged-up male sex workers could thus be set on by outraged female streetwalkers as well as by common or garden ...”

“... as well as a blood relative of the former royal house. The 12th-century Byzantine poet and scholar John Tzetzes made the reasonable claim that, as a young man, and long before Magas’ breakaway, Callimachus had an entrée to the Ptolemaic court. Prior to this, however, we hear of him teaching at a school in an Alexandrian suburb, and complaining of ...”

“... of Moscow and the dominion of the world. Americans are readily alarmed, sometimes even panicked. John Foster Dulles, who worked for Truman and then became Secretary of State to Eisenhower, with a single-mindedness matching Mao’s lashed together a ring-fence around China, designed to contain the eastern end of the presumed Sino-Soviet monolith as Nato ...”