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“... adventures and the fact that three of his wives succumbed to ailments that suggested poison. Joseph Boehm, who designed the commemorative coins for the 1887 Jubilee, may – but then again may not – have died in flagrante with Queen Victoria’s ‘bohemian’ daughter Princess Louise. Politicians used smart dress to cover poor morals: ...”

“... to offer new information about the evening or the protagonists, though she has some about Joseph Ritchie, a young explorer, who was there too. Rather she pursues, with warmth and energy, the various currents of ideas that ran through the evening’s conversation. The narrative proceeds like good table talk. It digresses, moves between large subjects ...”

“... are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’ Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t ...”

“... on the years 1500-1800, is to remind us of what could be seen as the glory days of habeas corpus. John Anderson was a slave in Missouri. Separated from his wife and family, whom he wished to visit, he came into conflict with his master and owner, who decided to resolve the problem by selling Anderson to another owner. In 1853, Anderson escaped and made for ...”

“... by the rival needs of literature and politics has long been familiar to modern editors. John Dunn writes about it elsewhere in this issue of the London Review of Books. The present New Statesman has dealt with it by seeming never to have heard of it. It is a problem which, in certain of its relations, may be thought to have been new to the world ...”

“... identified as causes of disease. Bad smells and visible grime were easier to point to. Long after John Snow’s demonstration that something waterborne would explain the distribution of cholera cases in the area served by the Broad Street pump (his plan of the area, mapping mortality, is on display) the theory that it was a miasma – infected air – that ...”

“... Did all Van Dyck’s male sitters really have the long-fingered, blue-veined hands that Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard share with the Abbé Scaglia and so many others? Were the hands of Rembrandt’s sitters really all solid and paw-like? Those of Jacob Trip, his wife, Margaretha de Geer, and Hendrickje Stoffels seem to be generated by the ...”

“... is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious chefs – and to his and Gill’s generation of restaurant critics, the transgressive has become familiar. He’s not unaware of this, of course, and so, for the first time in his career, tries to ...”

“... one can suppose, run foul of that opinionated, jealous and vindictive theorist of language, Joseph Stalin. In this country, whatever future lay open for Saussure early on was blighted by the remarks made about him by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, where he is dead and buried by page six, charged with having ‘concocted’ the ...”

“... civilian cars slowed down to watch, and in full view of apartment houses. As the police novelist Joseph Wambaugh put it, this was not brutalisation, it was street theatre. Finally, after at least two minutes of beating, electrocution, kicks and, as he claimed, ‘racial slurs’, King was handcuffed and bundled into a police cruiser. On their way home the ...”

“... But was the Nazi leadership so fearful? Aly alleges that in 1943, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who carefully monitored the popular mood, ‘called for urgent measures to prevent the German populace from rising up against the regime’. But check this against Goebbels’s diaries and you find anything but fear of the population. The ...”

“... gently selfish hypochondriac). But not so in ‘the Novel’ as a genre. Moll Flanders, Pamela, Joseph Andrews: three of the protagonists of pioneering novels of the 18th century are servants (though they end up as something better). It is entirely traditional in the English novel to make space for servants, resourceful or absurd as needs be. Austen is ...”

“... Enlightenment’ is gripping. He doesn’t make it altogether clear why Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin chose to base their Lunar Society at Soho House in Handsworth, but he does paint an intriguing picture of the industrial-scientific circle that grew up around them. For these men, the line between industrial development and ...”

“... like the dreadful Vodi, despoilers of life, who work for Nelly, the witch with pointed teeth, in John Braine’s best novel, The Vodi, which appeared in 1959. Such demonic fantasies are quite common, I think, when young men are locked in a long-running conversation in, say, barrack-rooms or hospital wards. In Pinter’s case, the fantasy of ‘the ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”