“... And many of Maschler’s authors weren’t household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan Cape. His stable has included Philip Roth, García Márquez, McEwan, Martin Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Chatwin, Fowles, Deighton and, Maschler does not fear to admit, Jeffrey Archer. The title he was most excited to publish was Catch 22, a novel he ...”

“... through Jesus Christ that the stones and beams of our houses would sing hallelujah.The expressive power of the sequence derives not just from lyricism but from the anguish of what is withheld.‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’ is bundled together with two other sequences, ‘Thorow’ and ‘Scattering as Behaviour towards Risk’, establishing ...”

“... compared to other items of luxury consumption such as jewellery or silver-plate’, according to Jonathan Brown in Kings and Connoisseurs, who makes the comparison vivid by observing that the cost of lace on a gown worn in 1613 by the daughter of James I was, at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his ...”

“... abolition to their own and allied governments – Mrs Thatcher was particularly scathing. But as Jonathan Schell points out in The Gift of Time, ‘history often creates a problem whose only real solution lies beyond the pale of current political acceptability.’ Reykjavik expanded the pale: it brought the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons into the realm ...”

“... and shifting political stances have at times dulled the sheen.’ In The Chan’s Great Continent Jonathan Spence reflects on 48 ‘sightings’ or mis-sightings of ‘a great but distant culture’, stretching from the 13th century up to the Seventies. Was Marco Polo really in China between 1275 and 1292, working as an agent of the Mongol ruler, Kublai ...”

“... his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly with his origins. ‘For all the dramatic changes that were to occur ...”

“... a troublemaker and we don’t want him here.’ This minor incident goes unmentioned in Jonathan Eig’s new biography of King, of course. But it illustrates a theme to which Eig returns several times. People of every political persuasion now claim King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable ...”

“... Fourth Geneva Convention begins:To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the co-operation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and ...”

“... sign that US forces did not find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: a truly totalitarian power would have behaved like a bad cop who plants drugs then ‘discovers’ evidence of the crime.) However, although the photographs were only made public at the end of April, the International Red Cross had been sending the US and UK authorities reports of ...”

“... donors and graduates played roles in sustaining slavery, its ideological underpinnings and its power.’ Deeds, baptismal records, wills and probate inventories list the names of more than two hundred people purchased, possessed and sold by the founders of Yale. New England’s Puritan colonies, Blight writes, emerged from a landscape of ...”

“... was published – shortly after Mill’s death in 1873 – it revealed its extraordinary emotional power. ‘Everyone talks of Mill’s Autobiography,’ George Eliot noted, and marvelled at the ‘delight’ the book was giving her. Mill had managed to translate a life of relentless philosophising into an engrossing narrative of doubts, hopes and ...”

“... you see that her first novel is a nouveau roman; Angela Davis’s struggle typifies the Black Power movement, until you see that it’s Charlotte Corday all over again. Jacqueline Bouvier was born into an age that still thought speaking French was like playing the piano: something upper-class girls did. But French was also a space for her to dream ...”

“... Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), the first book by Jonathan Crary, now Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia. The recent move to digital modes of image production and distribution had prompted Crary to reflect on revolutions in visuality in the past.Techniques of the Observer begins by ...”

“... China and – in the phrase of anguished Americans who backed the wrong horse – he lost China. Jonathan Fenby starts his important new biography, the first of substance for a quarter of a century, in Xi’an in 1936 when Chiang, after his 50th birthday, was preparing to bash the Communists. Having ignored the local armed forces’ evident reluctance to ...”

“... like Coe caricaturing aspects of himself. Both characters draw attention to the gap between the power the political novelist believes himself to possess and his work’s real influence. PC Pilbeam’s nickname at work is ‘Nate of the Station’, and the novel switches between being a State of the Nation novel and a Nate of the Station novel – a work of ...”