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“... house-guest for most of his life, stands on the pre-professional side of the divide: Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, on the post-professional side. The careers Dorothy Stroud and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had ...”

“... the heads of the major German corporations, moved in high circles – from which, as Henry Ashby Turner showed in his excellent study,* they looked down on the Nazis with shuddering distaste and mounting alarm. For their part, Hitler’s economic advisers regarded the world of big business with something between deep suspicion and open enmity. All their ...”

“... and glorious’. He leapt like Marcus Curtius into the gulf, taking with him, according to John Barrell, the whole moribund tradition of High Art. Haydon’s status as one of the few literal martyrs to critical theory makes him an appropriate, if somewhat ominous subject for Painting and the Politics of Culture. Here the questions raised implicitly in ...”

“... and the Emancipator, H.W. Brands has written a dual biography of Lincoln and the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859 led a band of 22 men to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. The divergent paths chosen by Brown and Lincoln illuminate a problem as old as civilisation itself – what is a ...”

“... and a few steps forward would take you into some infinite, radiant void. It’s easy to see why Turner told Ruskin that the skies over Thanet were the most beautiful in Europe. Thanet has two parliamentary constituencies, North Thanet and South Thanet, and a single local council, also called Thanet. Otherwise ‘Thanet’ is a concept linking three seaside ...”

“... in paperback.’ This comment provoked mixed feelings. Still, perhaps there are judges of the Turner Prize who have never heard of – let alone seen a painting by – Ingres.So how did the judges do this year? Well, let us begin by congratulating them: for having chosen a serious book by a serious novelist; for behaving, mostly, with propriety; and for ...”

“... words of Nick Cohen. The best introduction to the history of British Trotskyism is a pamphlet by John Sullivan, a former member of the International Socialists, called Go Fourth and Multiply/When this Pub Closes – that’s ‘fourth’ as in Fourth International.2 Sullivan, who died in 2003, wrote these notes in the 1980s as an affectionate but critical ...”

“... rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists abroad; she was less ready to give them armies or subsidies. Charles I, profoundly ...”

“... the three leading characters, Rube (Geraldine Sherman), Sylvie (Carol White) and Eileen (Vickery Turner), by means of a pan down from a sign for Clapham Junction station which fits them exactly to a place and time. The play’s loose, episodic structure allows for improvisation. What Loach was to call a ‘go-in-and-grab-it type of filmmaking’ follows the ...”

“... But is it any more startling than to find Aneurin Bevan willing (as I have just learned from John Campbell’s Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism) to see force used in 1948 against dockers seeking to defy Cripps’s wage freeze? Even the most right-wing employer cannot risk industrial relations being made unworkable. Even the most left-wing ...”

“... century, when the working class was still experiencing its controversial ‘condition’, Sharon Turner (a man, actually) was writing, in one of the half-dozen best-ever books about the Anglo-Saxons: ‘Nothing could be more calculated to produce a very striking dissimilarity, between the Gothic nations and the Oriental States, than this exaltation of the ...”

“... a gale, close-hauled under courses, making her way into a sea as sublime as even Turner could have wished. Then again he cites Falconer’s The Shipwreck as an epic that tries to marry the theories of Addison and Burke (‘agreeable horrour’ in the one, and in the other ‘terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... Nature by tracing the writings and life of the 19th-century British agrarian working-class poet John Clare,’ but letters to the writer and theorist Peter Wollen, her main married-man lover of the period, show her flailing: ‘I must get there, out of this endless selfishness a problem with always watching oneself … the autocratic autistic world that I ...”

“... fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil Beaton, engage with Georgian and Victorian architecture? What of the interwar flirtation with the Baroque, spoken for by Sacheverell Sitwell, or the period’s notions of Neolithic Britain? (Massingham, a long-out-of-print ...”