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“... of that tempestuous decade. Political Justice took its theme from the Marquis de Condorcet, Baron d’Holbach, Volney, Diderot and the other great Enlighteners of pre-Revolutionary France. Human beings, it asserts, are above all perfectible. They need look nowhere else for improvement but to themselves. Women are equal to men. Religion is ...”

“... of limited competitive entry to the civil service was crucial. Life, for the hosiery manufacturer Samuel Morley, was ‘really a continued competitive examination’. But all depended on who chose the syllabus, set the questions and marked the answers. Entrepreneurial politicians soon grasped that the new examinations for the public service were not designed ...”

“... MacGregor left the Department of Transport to become a director of the merchant bank Hill Samuel, which, while he had been Secretary of State, advised British Rail on the Channel Tunnel. (MacGregor has now been sacked in a cull of jobs at Hill Samuel, and we must wait for next year’s accounts to know the extent of ...”

“... woman.To begin with, Dupin was not middle-class or merely wealthy. The illegitimate daughter of Samuel Bernard, a financier who helped to fund the War of the Spanish Succession under Louis XIV, she married Claude Dupin, one of the directors of the tax-collecting Ferme générale. The Dupins lived in a splendid mansion near the Palais Royal in Paris, and ...”

“... in this world rather than salvation in the next. The belief was made explicit by atheists such as Baron d’Holbach, whose Système de la nature (1770) reproached the clergy for making people’s lives miserable while comforting them with the delusory hope of a happier life in the hereafter. The mainstream Enlightenment, by contrast, was not against religion ...”

“... to degrade the nobility of literature and ideas. This was the view held, for instance, by Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, forger, embezzler and (as Johns writes) a ‘self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions’. Brydges spent much of his life composing unremarkable sonnets (about 2000 a year as he got older) while trying to prove (on ...”

“... not tend to their advantage.’ He expressed the emotional roots of this attitude in a letter to Samuel Rogers, in three sentences with a stirring cadence such as he seldom used (and a possible Shakespearean echo): I saw amongst them, much merit – much patient suffering – wonderful endurance – industry – care and desire to be and to appear ...”

“... grocer in Keighley, whose shop went bust in the 1930s. He ended up in the House of Lords as Baron Briggs of Lewes, welcomed to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, the guest of millionaire and aristocratic friends, chairman or member of countless committees of the great and good, all the while (to the condescending pleasure of posher colleagues) keeping some ...”

“... the Tatler dressed up in Fascist regalia at a ‘Blackshirt’ dinner. When the Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare fixed up a deal with Pierre Laval, the French Foreign Secretary and a Nazi fellow-traveller, to legitimise Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia, the Duke also travelled to France. Whatever part he played in the Hoare-Laval Pact, he enthusiastically ...”

“... hath not seen nor pen can write the ghastly coarseness of the sight.’ Its proprietor, Baron Alfred de Rothschild, liked to admire it from a dogcart drawn by two zebras. His other fancy was to conduct a Hungarian band in the winter garden. If Classicism was the vernacular in England, Scots Baronial was the required whimsy north of the ...”

“... The man​  in the title of Julian Barnes’s eighth work of non-fiction is the Parisian physician Samuel Pozzi. The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject ...”

“... septuagenarian piety (‘Preparation for eternity’). Jones didn’t mean, his first biographer, Baron Teignmouth, nervously added, that we shouldn’t be preparing for eternity the whole time. But it was secular immortality he really had in view as he worked his way through the demanding regime of intellectual and practical attainments laid out in the ...”

“... where he had his first intuition of mortal blankness, commemorated in the rolling of his eyes in Baron Gros’s picture The Battle of Eylau. As for Kerguelen, he found the offensive clutter of the island he had discovered – its rocks, bogs and watercourses, all surmounted by the hideous mockery of its greenery – so repulsive that he could not bear to set ...”

“... dithyrambic praise of the English constitution in The Spirit of the Laws, like Diderot’s for Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles’) caused French hearts to beat even faster. A steady supply of political pilgrims made their way across the Channel to observe the ...”

“... Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot tarmac. We can’t afford to ignore ...”