“... among them. The case against Cecil has recently been revived by Alford’s former supervisor, John Guy, in his biography of Mary, My Heart is my Own (2004). Any subsequent biographer is forced to address Guy’s case against Cecil. Alford has not done so explicitly, but he has accepted some of Guy’s charges, while others are either ignored or treated ...”

“... Others describe it as one among many manifestations of French republicanism. The Yale historian John Merriman’s new book concentrates on the chain of events that created the Commune, and the main players behind its formation. He opens with a description of Paris in 1870: its western side a playground for the rich, the east an overpopulated slum. The class ...”

“... into her new classroom, the children dive for cover under their desks, shrieking. Only one boy, John, stands firm, saying: ‘I ain’t afeared.’ The children are often hungry, unwashed, shivering in threadbare hand-me-downs, only able to express themselves through blows and screams and tears. This was shocking to Gilroy and her fellow immigrants from the ...”

“... less so. Indeed, there was no parallel in English history since the French invasion against King John in 1216. Before explaining why people reacted in this way, we should consider who reacted in this way. The answer, clearly, is the group around the Twelve Peers: Saye, Warwick, Pym, Hampden, St John, Cotworthy and their ...”

“... for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political argument, has fallen back upon as a last ...”

“... itself, is chiefly valuable for its diversity. The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians edited by John Cannon is a splendid work which, even in these straitened times, should be snapped up by every self-respecting school and college library. There are over two hundred contributors; there are more than four hundred and fifty biographical essays on the great ...”

“... is obviously having an affair with me’) is definitely about the real stuff as opposed to the John Travolta variety, and works because it’s wry and faithful to its subject, without straining after the big effects that phrases like ‘the geography of my thighs’ or ‘cosmic spite’ announce are as yet unavailable to her. With lines like The smell of ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was cast as the ringleader, pleaded ...”

“... and so does any theory you construct from it. In Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy opens up a startling new angle on certain secret operations of the mid-1580s. If he is right, he has blown an extraordinarily effective cover, which had everyone fooled at the time and has survived intact for four centuries. Some of the links in his ...”

“... One of John McGahern’s stories begins thus: ‘There are times when we see the small events we look forward to – a visit, a wedding, a new day – as having no existence but in the expectation. They are to be, they will happen, and before they do they almost are not: minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life ...”

“... Psychoanalysis, says John Kerr, is ‘in a period of institutional decline’: ‘Candidacies are down, patients are harder to come by’ and other therapeutic disciplines are clamouring for attention. The seeds of this sorry situation were sown during the six-year partnership between Freud and Jung, when ‘historical accuracy first came to be less important than ideological correctness ...”

“... a point that has always been disputed. ‘Every stanza,’ wrote Spenser’s 18th-century editor John Hughes, ‘made as it were a distinct paragraph, grows tiresome by continual repetition and frequently breaks the sense, when it ought to be carried on without interruption.’ Others contrast Spenser’s heavy pace and patches of opacity with the more ...”

“... gives me may expand the space for critical thought more than the privileges I enjoy erode it.’ John Hall, now at the University of Southampton, read history at Oxford but was seduced (his word) by Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy into historical sociology in the liberal tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment. Wright’s ...”

“... was to further his own work.’ But those who stayed behind were even more remote from reality. ‘John Sargent, painting in the Austrian Tyrol, continued undisturbed.’ Pound carried on fighting for T.S. Eliot. Jacob Epstein told his patron John Quinn: ‘My business as I see it is to get on with my work ... Everybody here ...”