“... with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them bought heavily into Rockwell. The new offer ‘A Young Girl’s Dream’ is now available at £12.45 and ...”

“... at the speech day of one of Magdalen’s schools and had regaled the boys with a history of the major benefactors of the college (and thus of the school), showing that all of them had acquired their wealth by foul means and had had enough left over to buy themselves indulgences through their benefaction: the moral being that if you hear that ‘crime never ...”

“... women is not necessarily to learn much about the operation or the balance of past sexual power. A major surprise of Fraser’s book is her decision to draw so little on the imaginative literature of the time. Simple and obvious questions ask themselves. Why is there so large a gap between the depressed condition of women apparently prescribed by sermons and ...”

“... administrative hierarchy. I myself needed no persuading of the wrong-headedness of the campaign by John Hoskyns (who is not mentioned in the lecture) for politicisation of Civil Service appointments, and I think that others will also find the arguments convincing. The lecture describes the close working relationship that can exist between a minister and a ...”

“... fashion they celebrate collective traditions while legitimating competitive struggle. The major party Conventions mark the midway stage of the election. And so, while sounding full of fight and confident of victory, the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election ...”

“... ascribing a multitude of experiences to one figure has been vigorously maintained, especially by John Berryman in Dream Songs, though in that case the necessary distinction between ‘Henry’ and Berryman didn’t survive the strain he put on it. In the end, Berryman overwhelmed his creation by falling upon him. Harsent has given his puppet a busy life: he ...”

“... makes enlightening reading for the Westerner. (For the Israelis, who have already produced several major Crusade scholars, it is of course of more pressing relevance.) It is, truly, an amazing story. At the end of the 11th century a European army, which may originally have numbered no more than thirty-five thousand, and which was much reduced by ...”

“... the record straight about him. He has followed Botham’s astonishing 1985 season through every major match, describing and assessing each achievement. No one is better qualified to do that. For my money, Keating is the country’s top sports writer by a long distance (and there are many other good ones). He writes pretty well about any sport, but cricket ...”

“... and imitated ‘superior’ Italian humanism. In this she is following the lead of the late John Hale, whose last book, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance, let the Danube School of artists, Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, share space with Leonardo et al. Rublack’s quest has taken her to fascinating primary sources in German ...”

“... admiration for D.H. Lawrence as well as Hitler, Bradford has brought himself up to speed on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... that in no scene would he be required to remove his trousers. Lowe, it turns out, was a sergeant-major in the war, and John Le Mesurier, who played the limp Sergeant Wilson, was a captain. Now Lowe was playing a bank manager who had come up the hard way, and Le Mesurier, his chief clerk, was a pampered ex-public ...”

“... insist that American history is a bit more complicated than that. War, they write, has been the major ‘engine of change’ that ‘defined’ American history and created the American empire. They reject the popular idea that Americans go to war only as a last resort, motivated by self-defence or the desire to preserve and spread freedom rather than ...”

“... Nero in a very different mode from the Antichrist. The sixth-century historian-cum-fantasist John Malalas gives him the honour of executing Pontius Pilate: ‘Why did he hand the Lord Christ over to the Jews,’ his Nero asks, ‘for he was an innocent man and worked miracles?’ How, Champlin asks, can we account for these discordant versions? Why was ...”

“... and a few of the stories in A History of the World are underpowered. But the only other major drawback is Barnes’s self-consciously whimsical humour, which might work in his journalism but often seems ingratiating between even soft covers. He has a particular weakness for jocular circumlocutions, bedecked – because novelists are supposed to be ...”