“... woolly mammoths, in order to sustain a viable population, would have to be the size of Wales (see Richard Fortey’s article in this issue). A handy website, www.simonkelk.co.uk/sizeofwales.html, has a ‘Walesometer’ for converting hectares/acres/square miles/square kilometres into Waleses. It shouldn’t be too long before EU harmonisation will ...”

“... though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non sine ira et studio) owe a great deal to Robert Wallace. He has translated eight hundred pages of very tough German as lucidly as literalness permits. (We also owe a lot to the MIT Press series ...”

“... of Shrewsbury should have given such sound pastoral advice to the founders of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams and his gang of merry chums: these old boys have shamed their old school, making it a byword. Shrewsbury, as Simon Raven notes, is now notorious for shrewishness. Grand old school-stories have furnished Raven with many quotes and ...”

“... counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and torture; despite, according to legend, being interrogated by Richard himself. ‘Thou servest for moonshine in the water a beggarly fugitive,’ ...”

“... they contain some of the funniest, most outrageous, acid and lugubrious writing I have ever read. I don’t think I have ever been spoken to by an author the way I have by Konwicki. The first of these four books is The Polish Complex (1977 – the translation by Richard Lourie in 1982), the first of Konwicki’s books ...”

“... went on the assumption that the synopsis, though it had to be fair, must be suitable for all to read, with a result that was very far from that intended. Even as I began to read the three or four lines, I fell into a state of dread that I had read, or was just about to ...”

“... is packaged as an account of the planning and conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It should be read as a study of the politics of war. Although Gordon and Trainor describe in stirring detail the celebrated ‘march on Baghdad’, their real contribution has been to identify the confluence of factors that inspired the march, shaped it, and produced ...”

“... burdensome. Marital status, so useful for reputation management, brought few other benefits. Richard Cosway refused to allow Maria to practise professionally; Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun was only too keen for his wife to sell her work so that he could pocket the proceeds; and whatever happened in Kauffman’s brief first marriage was so upsetting that ...”

“... This was a distinction that was lost on the railroads themselves. All you have to do is read journals of the time such as Railway Age, with their complaints about robberies, tramps seizing trains, tramps riding on trains and cowboys terrorising passengers, for such a contention to seem astonishing. Stiles himself repeats stories about travellers ...”

“... the second anniversary of the fire, killing 168 people. The far-right radio show host Alex Jones read the Department of Justice’s October 1993 report on the siege as a teenager and was so outraged that he decided to embark on a career that would turn him into the US’s most prominent conspiracy theorist; he led a memorial service at Mount Carmel in ...”

“... For the last thirty years Richard Sennett – urban sociologist, historian, novelist – has been meditating on the culture and ecology of industrial cities: on how they evolved, on how their physical organisation and social structure related to the psychological and moral experiences of their inhabitants. More pointedly than his previous books, The Conscience of the Eye, he says, aims to show the interactions between the ‘architectural, urban planning, public sculpture, and the visual scenes of the city’ and its ‘cultural life ...”

“... who writes rather thoughtful spy stories told me it was the best book about espionage he had ever read. It is a history of the CIA through the life of Richard Helms, who was director from 1966 to 1973. Much of Powers’s information comes from the spies themselves, and while it is a great achievement to persuade such men to ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”

“... It is natural to contrast this book with The Victorians and Ancient Greece, by Richard Jenkyns, reviewed by me in the issue of this journal for 21 August-3 September 1980 (Vol. 2, No 16). Mr Jenkyns is a Classical scholar and a smooth and polished writer; I wrote that he ‘offers a great deal of information, clearly and pleasingly ...”

“... the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane, would be much exercised by the discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s ...”