“... one or two slip-ups en route. Bacon is made to sound too much like Descartes; the philosopher John Toland was not British; and Raymond Williams was not a Marxist. Neither was Althusser the cold-blooded adversary of experience painted here. It is true that he saw experience as the homeland of ideology; but ideology is by no means simply a pejorative term ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would ...”

“... wrongs. The place was ours, and we went and took it back.’ In The Winter War, Patrick Bishop and John Witherow (who went with the Task Force for the Observer and the Times) conclude: The war had everything in its favour. It was neat and tidy. It had a simple motive and a simple response … No war is to be wished for, but if they have to be fought, this was ...”

“... full literary-historical context. Last year the Thomas marriage suffered trial by LRB letter-page. John Pikoulis accused Jonathan Barker of editorially fudging his contentions that ‘the breach between [Helen] and Edward was final,’ and that he effectively deserted her for the muse of war. Pikoulis rested his case on an assertion by Lawrance ...”

“... between them and a special kind of workers, the Irish, have been a controversial question: Dorothy Thompson’s discussion of it is illuminating. Her conclusion is that ethnic discords had less weight than the sense of common grievances, and that ‘there was a very considerable Irish presence in the Chartist Movement.’ Irishmen and many other Chartists were ...”

“... good stuff to come along. In his personal life, in bars or on manly roustabouts with the likes of John Huston and the Rat Pack, Bogart was inclined to believe in ‘Bogart’ just as his fans did. ‘Bogart’s a hell of a nice guy until around 11.30 p.m. After that, he thinks he’s Bogart,’ a Beverly Hills restaurant owner once said. But there is ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... are not the ones that the champions of the rich sometimes like to suggest. As Barbara and John Ehrenreich point out in their essay in the Occupy Handbook, ‘for decades the most stridently promoted division within the 99 per cent was between what the right calls the liberal elite – composed of academics, journalists, media figures etc – and ...”

“... a Chinese artillery barrage in Korea.Sparks didn’t write in the Olympian tones of Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann or C.L. Sulzberger. He was a man of the people who could bond with street-sellers in Cairo and GIs in Pyongyang. He was unabashedly partisan, fluent in the Cold War patois of ‘Commies’ and ‘Reds’ and ‘us’ and ‘them’. He ...”

“... How might one recognise depression in a mouse? Who’s to say how an autistic rat will behave?John Bumpass Calhoun, the subject of these two books, was one of the most famous advocates of rodent experimentation in 20th-century psychology. In both Rat City and Lee Dugatkin’s Dr Calhoun’s Mousery he is treated as an eccentric visionary, whose insights ...”

“... his head dutifully explodes. Score-keeper, deduct one life.Ihad returned,​ marvelling, to the Thompson room at Harvard’s Barker Centre with its statue of Winged Time. I had taken the same picture under the bust of John Harvard as I had on my last visit. I had seen William James’s house, had imagined Elif Batuman ...”

“... whom he confesses ‘a strange liking’ – his most influential model, or imaginative icon, is John Bunyan, whose life and work obsess him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural ...”

“... Brecht’s work in its setting (sacrilege can come later), the starting-point still has to be John Willett’s The New Sobriety 1917-33: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period.1 This marvellously illustrated book takes us through all the bitter political and cultural history, from the aborted revolt of the returning soldiers in 1918, the killing of ...”

“... Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also ...”