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“... of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time. Right up until the 1930s and Forties, characters in the ...”

“... team did not live to see their work in print. Most strange, however, is the virtual absence of Sir John Neale himself, explained (if that is the word) in a prefatory note by the present chairman of the Editorial Board. Criticism must be muted by these solemn signs of human evanescence. Vita brevis, labor longus: is it not almost indecent to question the value ...”

“... blood purges of the 1930s and the political infighting that accompanied his rise to power. Hedrick Smith, in his book The Russians described Medvedev as ‘a carefully calibrated nonconformist’, implying that he trimmed his sails to the wind. The conclusion suggested by a comparison between Let history judge and Khrushchev is rather different. The ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...”

“... the reverend submitted insurance claims on his nephew to the Beneficial National, the Vulcan, the John Hancock and the World Wide insurance companies. The reverend, who was black, was assisted in his macabre actuarial pursuits, as well as in his legal battles, by a white lawyer called Tom Radney. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an insurance industry that in ...”

“... He depicts himself aimlessly wandering through town from chip shop to toyshop to W.H. Smith (where he was once falsely accused of shoplifting). Lists can keep you company. The young Meades liked pointing out mistakes in grammar and ‘factual inaccuracies’. He was beginning to cotton on to adults’ ‘dissemblance of their ignorance, their ...”

“... towards maintaining large, sunny open spaces, even in early prehistory. Twenty years ago, Alan Smith and other archaeologists proposed that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers would have found an advantage in enlarging and manipulating grassy areas where wild grazing animals gathered, and in encouraging nuts and berries to grow on the edge of the wood or in ...”

“... a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one of the least ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... queens of the 1920s toured far and wide and sold millions of records. Their ‘empress’, Bessie Smith, appeared on Broadway and in movies. After her death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at Carnegie Hall. But Smith’s country cousins – ‘walking musicians’ – were lucky if they got recorded at all. ‘They ...”

“... I read: ‘Denis is in a very bad way.’ Alas it turns out to be Denis the cat. 14 September. John Bird calls to ask where I found the phrase ‘the habit of art’. I came across it in Mystery and Manners, a book of the incidental writings of Flannery O’Connor: ‘The scientist has the habit of science, the artist the habit of art.’ ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... an academic career in North America – Vice-President of the University of Toronto, President of Smith College. Her childhood memories, on a pastoral station deep in New South Wales, begin with the elemental force of the flat, baked earth, the endless horizon and the harsh light. This is the site of a ‘bush ethos’ which she characterises in familiar ...”

“... The day will come, and perhaps it is not far off, when John Locke will be universally placed among those writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil ...”

“... who figure in these pages in a very unfavourable light are that fun-loving clergyman, Sydney Smith, and the then unregenerate Tory, Gladstone. George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from 1824, was a puritanically self-righteous person, convinced that mankind is ‘born and saturated in wickedness’ and that his wards, in ...”