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“... A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s writings have little in common except an elegantly plain and direct prose, Clio herself would find it difficult to award the palm to one or the other. Hobsbawm is the most erudite, scrupulous and broad-visioned of the social and economic historians who have done much in the last thirty years to uncover the long-neglected lower depths of popular history; Gash has seldom, and never at length, strayed from the more ancient high road of Parliamentary and constitutional history ...”

“... been an obvious candidate. In respect of high office at least, the ‘public career’ with which Robert Stewart’s book is concerned ended in the reign of William IV: but Brougham – who, if he had indeed been decapitated, would surely have walked and above all talked for long enough after the event – lived on until Victoria had reigned for over ...”

“... rather regretfully admit, has not yet been superseded, despite numerous subsequent studies. Alan Stewart is a lively writer, but heavily (and uncritically) reliant on the established published sources and liable to turn reported into direct speech to keep the narrative flowing. His bibliography is impressive, but appears to have been only partially used. He ...”

“... have made an ideal fish-trap. Stemreway was one of six villages cleared in 1843 by a family called Stewart (who figure in some scalding stories told by Adam Nicolson) so the place could be turned into a ‘sporting’ enclave – a base for killing animals, birds and fish – centred on Eishken, the next settlement along the shore. The estate is still ...”

“... High Church Anglican Tories. Some Presbyterians, including Castlereagh’s grandfather Alexander Stewart, went further, immersing themselves in the ‘commonwealth’ legacy of 17th-century radicalism. By the 18th century, the Good Old Cause of the Civil War had been revised to meet contemporary tastes and susceptibilities, with Puritanism given a ...”

“... moment in a verbal contest, a gaudy, point scoring mockery against the serious-mindedness of Sir Robert Peel or, later, Gladstone. Byron’s is itinerant, physical, and (perhaps most distinctively) shuns the maternal and the doting for the anti-familial, for the generosity of pure sexual scandal. Disraeli, hermaphroditically gliding between his exotic ...”

“... extended Article 2 to cover the death of Zahid Mubarek, a 19-year-old Asian prisoner murdered by Robert Stewart, with whom he shared a cell. Stewart was a violent racist – as the authorities knew when they allocated him a cell with his eventual victim.) The authorities had to act in accordance with Article 2, which ...”

“... in an age of religious wars, both hot and cold. It is this considerable challenge to which Alan Stewart responds in only the second biography of Philip Sidney in almost fifty years. Stewart draws on foreign archives, as well as on the Languet-Sidney correspondence and other letters secured by the private scholar James ...”

“... basic classroom lesson of history is that things look different depending on where you stand. Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq explores the history in progress of the Iraqi occupation from an unusual and illuminating vantage point. The book describes nine months Stewart spent in 2003-4 working ...”

“... concerns the village made famous by the extraordinary display of anger on the part of Colonel Bob Stewart and Jean-Pierre Thébault, the European Community Monitoring Mission’s Ambassador, when, live on camera, they stumbled across the evidence of a terrible massacre. On the road outside Ahmici, Stewart raged at the ...”

“... People always liked Jimmy Stewart and were amazed by his good luck. In the late 1930s, he worked under contract for the studio moguls at MGM. Almost alone in the industry, he later professed to have pleasant memories of the experience. He had affairs with many of his leading ladies, including Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich, as well as Norma Shearer, Olivia de Havilland and others, with no hard feelings on either side except in the case of Dietrich ...”

“... gritting his teeth). In yet another, he is administering a severe ticking-off to an apprehensive Robert Macnamara. And on page 113 of the book there is a paragraph that – rather in the manner of a single human cell, which contains all the genetic information required to construct a complete picture of its owner – tells us a great deal about the ...”

“... seriously incapacitated by an injured knee which defied the surgical skill even of the eminent Sir Robert Jones, was still obliged to cook the omelettes, since her husband would accept them from nobody else. Edward Garnett, Conrad’s literary adviser and intimate friend from early in his career, observed that his ‘ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make ...”

“... Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry’, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana ‘is to the travel book’. ‘To sketch the history of the British imaginative intercourse with the Mediterranean in modern times is virtually to present a survey of modern British literature.’ This last, at least, really ...”

“... truthful communication itself forfeits interest. The effect is oddly similar to the last poems of Robert Lowell, as if writing had become a habit quite lacking in relish, intensity or surprise. This strange American blight may, in both cases, be a deliberate effect: but if so, it is a dangerous tactic to adopt in a book of recollection. The reader is more ...”