“... of his predecessors had dreamed of. Roused after the relatively benign neglect of the absentee Richard Coeur de Lion, the northern barons were the most conspicuous in the rebellion. John raised huge sums for his doomed attempt to recover his lost empire, and in doing so provoked huge resentment. As Carpenter remarks, ‘had John been content with ruling ...”

“... see it, an independent Kurdistan by the cynical manipulations of the French and British colonial powers in the aftermath of the First World War, over the next hundred years they suffered serial and escalating repression: detention, torture and execution; the destruction of villages and bombardment with sundry weapons, including napalm and poison gas; and ...”

“... upon to appear in public, has in this treatise given a most notable instance of the extent of the powers of the mind.’ This is how the very first review of the Principia began, in summer 1687: from the start, you were forced to admire Newton’s modesty, and his genius. The reviewer, the young astronomer Edmond Halley, knew what he was talking about. Three ...”

“... would count as work). Nearly always he was accompanied by Clyde Tolson. A previous biographer, Richard Gid Powers, described the Tolson-Hoover partnership as ‘spousal’: this seems to be Gage’s sense of it, too. Were they lovers? Gage acknowledges the possibility, but doesn’t commit herself. She’s similarly ...”

“... it actually means ‘in the relative scale’. Updike never shied from applying his descriptive powers to the female body the way he would to, say, rural scenery; as the years went by, it wasn’t something that endeared him to his critics. (His defence: ‘description is a form of love.’) High school was the only place, with a few exceptions, where he ...”

“... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, Miles dismisses Salammbô as ‘the most ...”

“... white) American pop – during a spell in the Army. He shows us a sideman playing for Little Richard (‘I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice’) and, later, an itinerant with catholic tastes in New York City, listening to anything from the sonorous Ornette Coleman to Bob Dylan, the ...”

“... comes to find it difficult to write about Charles without moderation. Instead of thinking, like Dr Richard Cust, that revision has tended to throw out the baby with the bathwater, he thinks that there are large quantities of Whig bathwater still to be drained. Many of Dr Sharpe’s arguments will be engaged by historians for some time to come. He does not ...”

“... closely into the price of rhubarb and cabbages. ‘A few clean-run British officers with plenary powers would very soon set things right’ in that quarter. And when either middlemen or retailers are discovered to be making more than a fair profit we should ‘clap the offenders in gaol’. From all this Doyle emerges as eminently a trenchant writer, and one ...”

“... 1642, is shaped at least in some degree by the need to seek out an ancestry for the separation of powers. By contrast, Joyce Appleby’s essay is valuable in large part because it stresses what was un-English about the 18th-century American dream – the abundance of American land. The availability of landed property for a majority of whites enabled men like ...”

“... impact on the Soviet Union make valuable contributions to assessing the prospects for change. Richard Owen was the Times correspondent in Moscow from 1982 to 1985, while Martin Walker has been the Guardian’s correspondent since 1984. Their approaches provide an interesting contrast. Owen’s, as his title indicates, is avowedly Kremlinological, and the ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination ...”

“... spend in opposition. Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Anthony Crosland’s reflections on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in ...”

“... most harrowing account of such an exile in his story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. But many others, Richard Rhodes James for example, have recorded their experiences as ‘orphans of the Raj, paying the price of empire by a separation from parents’. Parents, too, of course had to pay the price, especially mothers, who were forced to choose between living for ...”

“... atheist denying a dying or dead Catholic the consolations of religion. Coming away I see Richard Ingrams, swathed in a black anorak, trudging along the pavement. He has a brief word with Fr Cunningham, much as, one feels, Oxford dons used to have with the train driver at Paddington when he’d brought the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In ...”