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“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”

“... from time to time exhibit selected Screen Tests. The idea was already in the air. The neo-dadaist, John Cage-influenced Fluxus artists were already making similar perversely conceptual films. At least a year before Warhol began documenting faces for The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, the Icelandic political pop artist Erró, then based in New York, was at work on a ...”

“... to the ecological demands of commercial modernity. Even the economists cared about nature. Adam Smith was a theorist of what the economic historian E.A. Wrigley called an ‘advanced organic economy’, and so had to think about land. Such an economy relied entirely on the soil as a source of energy and raw materials. Production could be expanded only by ...”

“... fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, “Perhaps it will be born dead.”’Comyns ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... when we would like to know just how much inventing has been done. Did Philip Larkin really say of John Wain: ‘No advantage of birth or position or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now’? If I was John Wain, I would want to be sure of the exact words. According to Amis, Wain used to think of Larkin as a ...”

“... his own ideas.’ The exact quotation, incidentally, comes from a letter Byron wrote to John Murray on 9 October 1820: Mr Keats whose poetry you enquire after – appears to me what I have already said; such writing is a sort of mental masturbation – he is always f – gg – g his Imagination. I don’t mean that he is indecent, but viciously ...”

“... is tantalisingly omitted. The effect is reminiscent of what Orwell describes in 1984, when Winston Smith ventures into the proles’ sector to quiz an old man in a pub about what the past was really like, before the Revolution. All he gets is ‘a rubbish heap of details ... they remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a work-mate, a hunt for a ...”

“... included the king, the lobby’s influence was out of all proportion to its size. As Denis Mack Smith demonstrated long ago, it was the monarchy’s extensive prerogatives that made it possible for Italy to embark on colonial conquest with only partial parliamentary scrutiny. The colonial delusions of Umberto and his queen Margherita were shared by ...”

“... Venice with his memories. Some will read his diary with amused contempt; and it almost looks as if John Sparrow intended them to do so. He mocks Leeves in his epilogue with some rollicking verses to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’. Leeves was what Guardsmen used to call an old twank. The diary begins with him twittering in Venice. ‘Cannonade every evening ...”

“... of attractive works of art. The count would rise to eight if his taste ran to the work of Gwen John, or even to a dozen if he were indulgent. The remainder of the illustrations, some 94 per cent of the total, could serve equally well as the illustrations to a book called Dreary Painting Through The Ages. Ms Greer tries to upgrade some of these ...”

“... Adolf Grünbaum in Pittsburgh, to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... it at any rate materially superior. Yan Fu took on board almost everything he found there: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, the notion of impartial justice, patriotism. Until then, however, prejudice and hostile stereotypes persisted. ‘The English,’ announced placards posted up in Canton just after the First ...”

“... birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the moralistic Beaverbrook) had a picture of the baby under the headline: ‘Who Is My Daddy?’ It was a feast, all the more so because ...”