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“... while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could have been made of Robert Brentano’s amazing essay on ‘The Sound of Stubbs’, which gets an endnote. But such lists are unimpressively easy to compile and doing so is a sort of Actonian party game, though one encouraged by Kenyon’s general tone and approach. True, the ...”

“... as the old ex-colonies of Latin America do, while the ‘real people’ survive, paying mere lip-service to the revolutionary slogans. ‘I laughed when Acheampong named a traffic roundabout “Redemption Circle”,’ observes Professor Sackey: the poor thing was ‘still going around in circles trying to find out what it is supposed to redeem!’ All the ...”

“... Rome’s ‘black nobility’, the cluster of families whose 19th-century fortunes were built on service to the papacy. In these circles, the Pacellis ranked very high, described by one historian as the most important papal family since the Borgias. Eugenio’s grandfather, Marcantonio, was a key financial administrator under Pope Pius IX until the fall of ...”

“... verse, and, according to a website about Afghan hounds, once owned the cave in which Robert the Bruce hid out. I’d just confirmed that A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo was packed with neo-Jacobites when my acquaintance popped up online with further information about the annual Mass. ‘I should add, it’s this Wednesday,’ he ...”

“... Comintern’ comes in for further treatment, this time in a long autobiographical essay by Robert Cecil. Perhaps the chief novelty is the persistent implication that the writer, academic and MP, Goronwy Rees, may have been active in the Soviet cause over a considerable period of years. If so, it certainly lends a new twist to one’s reading of the ...”

“... French vers, or lines). It seems the poems still lie in a musty box in the archives. Robert Wohl, who teaches European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Los Angeles, does not say whether he rummaged through that musty box, but he has turned up many a fascinating source for his book. His purpose is to remind us of the tangled ...”

“... England’s General Synod occurred during an impromptu speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Robert Runcie was speaking against an amendment urging the Church to delay re-submitting its Clergy (Ordination) Measure to Parliament until ‘after the next Parliamentary General Election’. The point at issue concerned not women priests but the anomalous ...”

“... settled on ‘multiple sclerosis’.Towards the end of a long walk on a summer’s day in 2017, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst noticed that his legs felt heavy and poorly co-ordinated. ‘By the time I reached my front door I was shuffling along like an old man in carpet slippers.’ He was in his late forties and wondered if these were the first flickering signs ...”

“... instruments on which they occasionally played tunes (presumably B’s favourites) during the service. There were extraordinary-looking people: blacks with plaited and reefed hair; four girls, as like one another as quadruplets, all of them wearing bowler hats; a young man wearing what seemed to be a Chinese peasant’s hat, looking theatrical, as if a ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for ...”

“... computer contract for the Wessex Regional Health Authority, the bungling of which cost the Health Service at least £20m. The Authority, which was heavily criticised by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, had been ‘advised’ by Andersen Consulting that though the firm’s tender was higher than others, the best possible candidate to provide the ...”

“... imperative or exhortation, not a statement of fact. An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile; its reputation can be won or lost in an afternoon. The worst of the winds and tides it has to face is the ...”

“... titles is an important one in George Ignatieff’s book, as is the family tradition of public service which got the Ignatieffs their estates and their title. His great-grandfather, rewarded by Nicholas I for the support which he gave him in the Decembrist revolt, was commander of the Corps des Pages for twenty-five years, and presided late in life over ...”

“... is a separate story), he has always seemed tangential. The works have become a kind of multiple service industry, studied in part and for divergent reasons. Art historians need to know something about him; so, in quite another manner, do political economists. Those wanting to look at the development of religion, or mythography, or science, find him ...”