“... 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 ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... records in 1898, ‘Went for a short ride up Maddingley road. Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees,’ the flash of hindsight tells us that this is the origin of a key episode in The Longest Journey; but in the moment of its happening whatever thoughts or feelings it stirred in him remain hidden. In the more revealing notebook diaries Forster ...”

“... and another penny dropped, and the portcullis rose on the first tableau, the head was back on the young queen’s shoulders, and she was ready to meet her stern tormentors once again, to pit in vain her beauty and her freshness against their heavy, grown-up authority. Sometimes, amid the protests of my nanny (‘Isn’t it a waste of money?’; ‘Isn’t ...”

“... longueurs. His detective is a marginal presence, cohabiting in Pooterish domesticity with a nice young man. Ackroyd doesn’t burden his narrative with the tedium of a convincing topography, or nostalgia for the lost decencies. He’s busy, with this Post-Modern Sweeney Todd, reviving the shilling shocker – which, thanks to the confusion of the current ...”

“... and if, for Wordsworth, it was just then ‘bliss to be alive’ and ‘very heaven’ to be young, you couldn’t tell that from Malthus’s surviving early sermons: recycled, inoffensive homilies in which the revolutionary events in France were scarcely even noises off. (The mild young Malthus could have been a ...”

“... difficult relationship, and any vestiges of paradise faded quickly. Photographed nude by her young husband in ‘“artistic” poses’, Peter’s mother, Nan, was a midwife’s daughter who later told Peter that her father had raped her mother ‘at knifepoint on their wedding night because she was menstruating and reluctant to make love’. Peter was ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”

“... in a Guardian video broadcast, then on mobiles, and a gathering number of viewer/readers – all young, with the intense expressions of actors showing how focused they are on something important – responding with a flood of thoughtful, polite, informed challenges to or endorsements of the Guardian’s first draft of history. ‘This isn’t right. The ...”

“... more rigorous and living languages’. In his last chapter, a fascinating discussion of the art of David Walliker, he makes it plain that meaningful law is impossible because under contemporary conditions of ‘ultra-modernity’ the authority required by such a law cannot exist. Instead we have only ‘the social forms of human absence’ arranged within ...”