“... neighbour at Euston. Urban planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the ...”

“... visit, during a tour in crippling heat of the ruined fortifications constructed around the port by Peter the Great, Wilhelm again forgot his instructions and buttonholed the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, on one of his latest hobby-horses, the need to establish a pan-European oil trust to compete with American Standard Oil. The ...”

“... has been split in two and the sections carved in the wrong order by someone unaware that Hebrew is read from right to left). The monument portrays the Hungarian nation, represented by an angelic figure, as the hapless ‘victim’ of Nazi violence. In fact, Hungary was one of the chief beneficiaries of Axis policy. Under the First Vienna Award of 1938, Germany ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to the duplicity was shock: ‘My relationship with my father was in ruins. I had ...”

“... The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward ...”

“... extensive list of unpublished documents consulted in German archives and published primary sources read in libraries in Berlin, Cologne, Freiburg and elsewhere. Over the eight years he took to research and write the book, Kurlander hoovered up everything even remotely connected with the topic. His argument unfolds logically and consistently. And there are ...”

“... however, the trend was in the opposite direction: the internal passport regime introduced by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century was long retained as a regulator of movement. The Russian internal passport on the eve of the First World War identified its holders (men only) by title or rank, religion, marital status and liability for ...”

“... Brussels itself. Hungarian highways, built with EU money, were dotted with billboards that read ‘Let’s Stop Brussels’. Merkel’s Christian Democrats gestured at ‘red lines’ – and Orbán crossed them with impunity. He could do it because while talking the talk of anti-neoliberal populism – describing himself as a ‘plebeian’ in ...”

“... dispatches of the period. In February 1873, ladies in New York opened an issue of Harper’s to read an account of a sjambok whipping: ‘The cat crossed his shoulders until his large eyes were bloodshot … his hands working in agony; but he kept silence until the thirtieth time the lash descended, when, with a deep groan, full of the misery of physical ...”

“... correspondence: did Molyneux keep the letter out of fear, or pride? There can be no doubt why Peter George Patmore, father of the poet Coventry Patmore, kept the letters in which Hazlitt passionately poured out his rage and jealousy over Sara Walker, the daughter of his boarding-house keeper, ‘who leads a sporting life with everyone who comes in ...”

“... was needed, some suggested, was ‘therapeutic coitus’, expressed with total lack of courtesy by Peter of Spain, who believed in applying ‘plasters or women to the testicles’. A good thrashing was Bernard de Gordon’s cure. Others had more civilised ideas. Yet it was never at any time a very civilised area, for all its romantic associations. Wack ...”

“... figures. He notes that people who have never visited museums feel that there are too many words to read. One is surprised that they were permitted (or could be bothered) to fill in this part of a questionnaire, but their response does at least suggest that some of the less educated members of the public would not appreciate having information about the class ...”

“... of magic, and partly to the historical researches of scholars like Frances Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ...”

“... Produced to accompany an exhibition in Essen, the book includes detailed catalogue entries which read well in their own right (although it is a pity that A.C. Pugin’s date of birth is wrong throughout). The first part of the book, which comprises a series of essays on subjects including painting, collecting, literature, science and economics, as they ...”