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“... English aristocracy has always been hard to draw, and perhaps never more so than in the case of John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth. Born in 1767 at the family’s Hampshire residence of Hurstbourne Park, Wallop grew into a child who betrayed signs of being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the ...”

“... But parties did quickly emerge, producing strange electoral results. The electors in 1796 chose John Adams, a leading Federalist, for president. Jefferson, his Republican rival, came second, becoming vice president. Four years later, when Jefferson again sought the presidency, Burr became his running mate. A few Republican electors were supposed to cast ...”

“... might use his wife solely to beget legitimate heirs, otherwise ignoring or abusing her while he took mistresses at will. The struggle for free marital choice, exempt from parental meddling, still furnished Restoration dramatists and 19th-century novelists with plots. Within this harsh picture, Burger maintains, conduct books brightened the moral prospects ...”

“... revolution (sometimes called the Second Reconstruction), a wholesale shift in historical outlook took place. Today, Reconstruction is seen as a noble effort to create the foundation of racial justice in the aftermath of slavery. The tragedy is not that it was attempted, but that it failed.Johnson’s reputation has fluctuated along with historians’ views ...”

“... out, Haydon, gave his paintings to the new National Gallery in his lifetime. As museums grew and took over from cabinets of curiosities they brought with them the organising systems of curatorship that we still use to classify art. Scholarship and order came in, novelty and showmanship went out. Late Georgian London had the best of both worlds. Haydon could ...”

“... it wasn’t under state control. It was a long time – more than two hundred years – before it took up anything like the role allocated to most central banks today: fine-tuning monetary policy to guarantee some balance in the national economy between price stability and employment. The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its ...”

“... death) did not help his case. Nevertheless a powerful counter-attack was launched on his behalf by John Terraine, and these efforts found some support among the new school of ‘War and Society’ historians such as Professor Brian Bond and the present writer, who argued that Haig’s faults were those of the old Army as a whole, and that the problems he faced ...”

“... had actually braved their father’s displeasure, and become an Anglican parson. After chiding John for pushing himself into the forefront of all their mother’s obituaries he has a swipe at his famous brother’s double standards: When I recall Father’s intense dislike of the Church of England and of the English public schools, and your professed ...”

“... a hundred years ago. These problems have also been discussed by another American scholar, the late John J. Winkler, a writer of great ability whose early death is much to be regretted. In The Constraints of Desire (1990) Winkler is mainly concerned with the position of women, but he contributed to Before Sexuality, a book of essays about ‘the construction of ...”

“... job and let it take the blame for your next book? Cecil Day Lewis’s predecessor as Laureate was John Masefield, who held the post for nearly forty years without seeming to know, or greatly care, what was required of him. Masefield was in place for so long that, by the time he died, most people had forgotten that we had a Poet Laureate. Every so often, he ...”

“... Fast food can easily stand for all that is wrong with America, but that is not the way John Jakle, a professor of geography, and Keith Sculle, a professor of history, see it. The trenchantly anti-ironic Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age is the third book in a trilogy that includes a volume on motels and another on gas ...”

“... in a solid black square and flourished it around the classroom as Negroes in a Cellar at Midnight. John Welch-man is fatally drawn to Allais’s parodies. He knows that he shouldn’t claim that his exhibited coloured rectangles were miraculous precursors of high abstraction, but he can’t entirely resist it. Of Allais’s 1897 sequence of single-colour ...”

“... the massive resistance of capital, labour, finance and public opinion. Unlike the Webbs, Mosley or John Strachey (in the authoritarian phase of his Coming Struggle for Power), PEP’s most outspoken planners still held to a belief in planning within an open democratic society. Yet they achieved this worthy position by evading the question of power. Power was ...”

“... Secondly, there were transcripts of conversations between Callas and the American music critic John Ardoin; and thirdly, the desolate tapes she made all alone in the last years of her life. Miss Stassinopoulos jogs doggedly through every step in Callas’s career, an exhausting business in view of the singer’s shuttlecock existence: one can’t blame her ...”

“... though some very old person today were to remember having met in childhood a person who had seen John Milton’. But we need not suppose that Lyttelton misunderstood what he was being told. Belloc, he recalls, was busy being ‘great fun’. And mere truth came a poor second to immediate effect with Belloc, whether he was setting out to entertain in company ...”