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“... water for practical and aesthetic effect and the rearrangement of awkward existing elements, even major ones like roads, were his established techniques for rendering the surroundings of a country house picturesque. The object of the interventions was to create an apparently natural, flowing landscape, one which, however artificially engineered, nevertheless ...”

“... of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late John Roberts, himself a pioneering exponent of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...”

“... Not Browning: but its author had read ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’. Both are by John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley. Not that he doesn’t write well, but the well-made poem is not what Eliot and Pound made of Tennyson and Browning. What is most individual in the anthology is that which lies outside the orbit of the great names: James ...”

“... was over, and therefore of little concern. Fatefully, as Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood show, this was also the way many non-European peoples were seen: as relics to be overhauled or replaced.The hundred-year period that began around 1870 also witnessed the birth and growth of sociology, the discipline most preoccupied with ...”

“... political activity and lobbying, but was a bad speaker, a reserved, cautious, taciturn man who, John Aubrey noted, ‘had not a generall acquaintance’. He lived in meagre lodgings in central London, and appears to have had a close friendship with Prince Rupert which, according to an early Marvell editor, Thomas Cooke, meant that when it was unsafe for him ...”

“... anti-Fascist. Until 1948, when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform (a postwar Comintern), Major Thompson had been a hero in Bulgaria. The following year, at the Kostov trials, a dozen Communists were accused of colluding with British liaison officers during the war, and now with Tito, to undermine the Bulgarian state. Frank’s reputation took a dive ...”

“... American colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John Stuart Mill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people self-evidently incapable of self-rule. ‘Despotism,’ he wrote, ‘is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end ...”

“... More particularly, he was the disciple who questioned the truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In John 20, the only gospel source for the story, he demands to see and touch the physical evidence of crucifixion – ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will ...”

“... Reformed Protestantism is often called Calvinism, after the French Reformer John Calvin, but that is a mistake; the Reformed had many and varied leaders and thinkers of significance, and one of the things that annoyed the Reformed about Lutheranism was its idolisation of the single figure of Martin Luther. There was good reason for ...”

“... it has become a key word in American culture, embraced not only by leading universities but by major corporations and arbiters of taste, high and low. One explanation for the ascendancy of ‘diversity’ is that it provided a ground for boosting racial minority candidates while obviating any need to revisit America’s history of racial injustice; it ...”

“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”

“... absent from the Longman edition, we must turn to the 20-volume California edition of The Works of John Dryden, compiled by generations of editors, and published serially between 1956 and 2000). Likewise, and no less justifiably, the prose is absent; save for the prose passages which prefaced or dedicated poems or volumes of poems, such as the ‘Discourse ...”

“... articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by ...”

“... to find any substantial group of American workers that has benefited from Trump’s tariffs. No major business coalition has backed his trade policy. When the wrecking ball swings too wildly – when, for example, Trump threatened to overturn Nafta, on which essential supply chains in Canada and Mexico depend – the business lobby pushes back. Steve ...”