“... splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum ...”

“... to use direct inquiry as a way of assembling the evidence for his account of ‘events he was too young to have witnessed and of countries whose languages he did not understand’. Today field anthropologists and oral historians have shown that the results more than justify the dangers of this method. At the same time, as Robert Fowler wrote in ‘Herodotus ...”

“... Cerdan, had died in a plane crash on 28 October 1949. They knew about her affairs with a string of young protégés, including Yves Montand. In 1952, they may have pored over photos of her wedding to Jacques Pills, a French singer and songwriter with dark matinée idol good looks. Dietrich was the matron of honour. The audience also knew that she’d been in ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... farcical, as the loss and recovery of his bones intertwines with the tempestuous fate of Italy. David Bowe reads Dante in dialogue with other lyricists of the duecento, while George Corbett examines his ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by ...”

“... founded the Memorial, became ‘the most important figure in Chesterton’s life’, according to David Baker in Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism. The two met when Chesterton went to interview Flower, ‘whose reign over Stratford-upon-Avon came as near absolutism as made no odds’. Flower was impressed by Chesterton’s refusal to ...”

“... and lip-reading – is not obviously a bad mode of education for those not deaf at birth. The poet David Wright, deaf from scarlet fever at the age of seven, tells, in Deafness: A Personal Account, how glad he is to have been at that kind of school. The people on whom oralism worked had some experience of speech and seem also to have been intrinsically ...”

“... hearing in this country. And Wallace deserves, at the least, a fair hearing. Colin Wallace, as a young Ulster Protestant, was infatuated with the symbols of the Union – the flag, the Crown, the Presbyterian Church, and the Army. He became a school cadet, a B Special, an Army marksman and parachutist, showing such outstanding energy and commitment that by ...”

“... synonyms every week. It was with characteristic British reserve, though, that Lieutenant-Colonel David Morgan, Commandant of the 1st Battalion of the Seventh Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Riders, set about straightening things out. The Gurkhas are the British soldiers whom, in an ugly slur, Garcia Marquez accused of committing almost unprintable ...”

“... exile was a traumatic experience, whose grip on his personality would tighten over the years. As David Kertzer shows in this subtle and brilliantly told account, the exile of Pius IX was an event that shaped modern Europe. The revolution that broke out in Rome in the spring of 1848 had begun not with protests, but with jubilation. Little was known of ...”

“... on all sides. It was wrong to say that ‘scarcely anything had changed.’ Not that the young Ferguson would have been aware of that in the 1960s; but by the time he came to write his book, some knowledge of it should have percolated through. The Kenya ‘Emergency’ is a major incident in the history of the end of the empire: it makes a difference ...”

“... B Goode’: ‘C’est Basso qui s’ra premier à L’Alpe d’Huez!’ (Ivan Basso, the young Italian rider, is now second in the Tour). A flailing German flag slaps me in the face. A Dutch fan dressed in orange offers to spray us with a giant water pistol. Hundreds of other cyclists – about twenty men to every woman – are churning up the ...”

“... devotee of the Bond books.) The author of Moscow Gold, ‘John Salisbury’, is in propria persona David Caute, present literary editor of the New Statesman. I don’t give anything away here, since the fact was divulged, with much nudging and winking, in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column of the Evening Standard – where the marriage of Barnes and Kavanagh ...”

“... the Godfather merged into a single script. Not surprisingly, two highly successful journalists, David Holden and Robert Lacey, decided to turn their talents to an exposition of this fascinating modern legend. Unfortunately Holden, a distinguished reporter with many years’ experience of the Middle East labyrinth, never lived to complete his book. He had ...”

“... get less than 50 per cent of the primary vote, the hectic dramas of late-night scrutineering. Like David Malouf, who has spoken of Australian election days as unacknowledged national carnivals, Hardjono enjoys them hugely. Better than most in early October, she also knew that there’s worse than Pauline Hanson. The election, in which the conservative ...”