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“... In a storeroom at Sussex University lie the records of Mass-Observation, an organisation of anonymous people-watchers which in its heyday ran into much criticism. Some of its supporters made large claims for its methods and findings; respectable journals hailed a new form of social research, while others jeered; Evelyn Waugh complained of ‘pseudoscientific showmanship ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”

“... size. The architect the duke commissioned was Pierre-François Fontaine, and it is the premise of Richard Sennett’s attractive novel that he chose for his assistant a young Englishman who was just finishing his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Frederick Courtland was the son of an architect who had learned his profession under the comfortably ...”

“... be reached from the main Eastbourne-Lewes road by an unmade track which, as it approached the broad slope of the beacon, abruptly divided, the right-hand fork leading to Charleston and the left to Tilton and the farm Keynes rented from the Gage Estate. The impression was one of seclusion rather than remoteness. There was nothing to surprise walkers in ...”

“... He discriminates between both periods and authors, drawing out the ‘passion for Heaven’ in Richard Baxter, the ‘clarity and assurance’ characteristic of Watts, Addison’s gentlemanliness, Charles Wesley’s ‘physicality’, Montgomery as ‘the greatest hymn-writer on the difficult subject of prayer’, the whisper and privacy in Keble’s ...”

“... survived as long as the Empire itself, but otherwise Seeley was neglected until in recent years Richard Shannon and Sheldon Rothblatt both identified him as a leading figure in the reorientation of the Victorian élite. Plainly there was scope for an intellectual biography to match the ideas to the man, and the task was undertaken as a PhD by Deborah ...”

“... Six hundred years ago this summer, Richard II lost his throne. Preoccupied by the attempt to shore up his failing Irish peace settlement, Richard unwisely delayed his return to the mainland in order to confront a rumoured uprising, and landed to find his kingdom already slipping from his grasp ...”

“... Theweleit’s tendency to expand the application of his analysis further and further, his broad, at times seemingly limitless concept of fascism, his claim that ‘the pathway to a non-fascist life is marked out a little further by every act of love-making in which the participants touch neither as images nor as bearers of names defined by the ...”

“... for the Centre Pompidou, and become famous overnight. The two – a 38-year-old Englishman called Richard Rogers and a 35-year-old Italian called Renzo Piano – design an exuberant building that delights some and outrages others: a glass box supported by a superstructure of steel and concrete, each façade a playful grid of prefabricated columns and diagonal ...”

“... usage and reminds us of the vagueness and flexibility of their own perceptions of themselves; a broad definition should also help to discourage oversimplification by showing how complex a phenomenon the middle class was. None the less, Macleod traces a historical process. She watches aristocratic patronage decline in the early 19th century, allowing ...”

“... These are the themes (though they are not spelled out in such a fashion) of Mark Girouard’s broad and crowded canvas. Through poetry, fiction, sermons, the literature of uplift, art and architecture, this machine-age recrudescence of Medieval idealism permeated Victorian culture, inspiring, in the end, Boy Scouts and empire-builders alike. The book is ...”

“... planning grids of the postwar era, with box-like dwellings arranged in neat rows on either side of broad motorways, separated by what Margaret Thatcher subsequently dismissed as ‘windswept piazzas’. Particular depths were plumbed by the Soviet Union, where ruined cities like Stalingrad (now Volgograd) were provided with grand neoclassical public buildings ...”

“... restricted field of vision. Bloch and Febvre had many international connections and shared a broad, cosmopolitan vision. Bloch himself declared that historians should ‘base their plan, the treatment of the problems they raise, even the terms they use, on the knowledge gleaned from work carried out in other countries’. He had studied in Germany before ...”

“... do that of the United States. Guy Gibbon is an archaeologist, but The Sioux is a synthesis of a broad range of scholarship. It is a thoughtful and earnest attempt to examine Sioux history from before contact with Europeans to the present day. The strength of Gibbon’s synthesis is his insistence on making the Sioux a people of history. Tribes, both in ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”