“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...”

“... including me and, somewhat later, Laura Freeman, first encountered the work of Miró and David Jones, Henry Moore, Brancusi, Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Gaudier-Brzeska and others. Like Ede’s life it spans the century; but, more than that, for those of us who had not grown up in houses where there were grand pianos or interesting pebbles ...”

“... Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the ...”

“... support, in turn rejecting the Taliban. To that end, the British ambassador has just said that we may be here for thirty years. I started mentioning this idea and got scorn or sarcasm from the soldiers every time. One lieutenant colonel even said that if I found any of the Foreign Office or Development people in charge of all this reconstruction, would I ...”

“... today often seems rather a shoddy affair. Many are PC, even if almost unconsciously so; and it may be that in taking up a novel readers would rather get away from all that. Kingsley Amis in the past could hardly have been accused of being PC, but in his latest there are impalpable traces of it, like mist beginning to thicken round a craggy old ...”

“... and find it wanting – Cardew was excited by the alternative that they appeared to offer. David Tudor, Cage’s pianist and pupil, was an important new influence, as were other American composers like Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young. He even contemplated emigrating to the United States. Cardew returned to London to digest these ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political importance of the 1924 government and to restore the place of its senior figures in the history of the Labour Party. Both focus on high politics, and in particular the way the members of the first Labour ...”

“... of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and ...”

“... about the ways new technologies and chemicals are already affecting our brains, and what they may do in the next few years. These chapters are very, very cautious (‘we just don’t know’). Both parts pack in an amazing amount of information, gracefully told anecdotes, and a certain amount of social-democratic ‘attitude’. But there is a ...”

“... and ancient and responsible for our most base behaviour, and that childhood nightmares of monsters may be traces of ancestral encounters with dinosaurs. (Like the idea that the heart is the centre of emotion, this seems to me a poetically precise description of a real phenomenon.) The connection of dopamine to addictive behaviour – Cobb cites a Facebook ...”

“... harsh and inviolable. Even Wilson’s feisty subject timed her pleasures to its unalterable rhythm.David Henkin sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week. By the time the United States was founded as an independent republic, he writes, North Americans were already ‘by the contemporary standards of Europe … particularly ...”

“... Cheshire, he notices, now has a fancy knot garden ‘exactly reproducing what the Tudor Moretons may possibly have had, or if they didn’t, ought to have had’.And the men and women who inhabit this land of dead but re-imagined great houses do not, Lees-Milne recognises, all see them in the same way. In the epilogue to the book, he mourns that – although ...”

“... that there will always be ‘conflicts between one way of life and another’; that pacifism may promote war rather than prevent it, because it is more interested in giving the pacifist a clear conscience than in navigating the rough seas of actually existing hostilities; that deceit may sometimes be a political ...”