“... end up on the same side as the Israelis. In America there are many voices – Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Congressman Les Aspin, among many others – who are today demanding openly what Eden, in the case of Nasser, and his colleagues could only resolve in most secret conclave: the destruction of Saddam Hussein, the old war aim of Khomeini, and the ...”

“... Oxford’s spell, or under the spell of an Oxford he never quite managed to locate. The young Ved may have been a trifle gauche and smarmy but the old Mehta is quite proud of him. We hear of the boy’s lively debating skills, his conscientiousness, his charm, and we are left in no doubt that, after a somewhat shaky start, he was eventually moving in the ...”

“... chapter on comparative cleanliness which ends with the judgment that ‘France and England may be ranked amongst the tolerably clean nations, England taking the lead: but real cleanliness is not general in either ... The majority prefer a modest degree of dirtiness as being more conducive to their true comfort.’ There is a mass of later secondary ...”

“... New Economic Policy, which rewarded the individual peasant and worker for his or her enterprise. (Richard Pipes’s new hook on the Russian Revolution disagrees, and paints Lenin as the inaugurator of the oppression of the peasants and workers.) The Revolution was betrayed by Stalin, who established the very unsocialist central command economy, with its ...”

“... poems he is never led to those wild shores of psycho-analytically-based allegorical meanings where Richard Wilbur, Harry Levin, Daniel Hoffman and others have happily roamed, finding that the Red Death in the story with that title is the disease of rationalism, that the tarn and the abstract painting in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ are expressions of ...”

“... anti-malaria teams of making their roofs fall down by the use of DDT. Ensued incredulity, as Sir Richard Burton would say. The roofs were made of attap (palm fronds), and there was an attap-devouring caterpillar that dwelt in the roof. In normal conditions a parasitic wasp preyed on these pests and kept their numbers down, but the wasps were highly sensitive ...”

“... it drew on still earlier work in social science (Sorokin, Andreski and Janowitz), social policy (Richard Titmuss’s rather naive equation of ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ with social reform, for example, is now very familiar) and Medieval studies. In the early Sixties at Edinburgh University, I launched special subjects on ‘The War and the Welfare State in ...”

“... Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household of a distant and more powerful relative: that of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury. As a clerk, though not yet a priest, and Chancellor ...”

“... surprising. Determining the ‘source’ of a river is, it turns out, not a simple matter. There may be many plausible contenders. You can argue that it is the joining together and accumulation of the water from a number of tributaries that constitutes the ‘source’, not any one of them in particular. This issue gave pause even to Victorian explorers, not ...”

“... 1959. ‘It will make far more interesting reading than The Quest for Corvo.’ In the late 1970s, Richard Cobb took the view that Peters merited ‘further study, perhaps even a short biography, as he is fairly outstanding both as an academic fraud and as a bigamist’. To complain that the account we have at last been given is somewhat unrelenting, that the ...”

“... guarantors of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... but enforcing, their new, ‘feudal’ rights over the lands of their leading subjects. Lawyers may have a weakness for tidying away messy realities, but they cannot generally create an intellectual model out of nothing, or force its adoption if it is too far out of step with contemporary norms. Reynolds meets the first point by arguing that the theory of ...”

“... of course, it’s Banks up-front, Major on the bench and Mellor for the early bath.) For a time, Richard Attenborough was club chairman. Viewed from the bleak kingdom of Don Revie up in Leeds, these ‘southern softies’ never stood a chance. It was Leeds, though, who lost – narrowly and unluckily – to Chelsea in that 1970 final. According to Alan ...”

“... still dressed in “couture” and the poor struggle along dismal pavements with little but C&A or Richard Shops to sustain them.’ The customers of C&A would surely be surprised to find themselves described as ‘the poor’ and most people expect to go along a pavement to get to the shops. Yet, despite her misplaced sympathy for the huddled masses in ...”