“... you not pack my dress shirt? PS: I have just found it’ that it is hard to see why Jerome was so keen they should ‘do business together’. He was no fool, however, and screwed up the publisher’s terms to his advantage. Most of Jerome’s papers were destroyed after his death, but there is no suggestion that they harboured dark secrets. In 1928, a year ...”

“... likely to cause his downfall. At least this is less bizarre than the bracketing of Gorbachev with Peter the Great and Alexander II as ‘Russian rulers who seized their country by the scruff of the neck and hurled it onto a new level of change and growth’. Quite apart from the highly inappropriate characterisation of Alexander II, the analogy sheds little ...”

“... to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents). If Netanyahu imagined that by attacking Gaza he could inflict defeat on Hamas, and rescue his own precarious political career, he has ...”

“... relies principally on intuition and imagination has its own drawbacks. Robb himself is sometimes keen on dates and facts, but only, in keeping with the Stukeleyesque tradition, when they suit. At its best, his overlay of the present onto the deep past is illuminating. Following Caesar’s Gallic campaign he finds a point in the streets of Hautmont that gives ...”

“... of Jack&Ian’s despised astrobiology. Unlike Jack&Ian, Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin are very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the Alien this feels conservative, as well it might when one sees Goodwin and ...”

“... viable direction of evolution was towards greater complexity. Even John Maynard Smith, usually as keen a Gould-basher as Wright, is with Gould on this: ‘Since the first living things were necessarily simple, it is not surprising that the most complex things alive today are more complex than their first progenitors.’ This is a default trend, not a ...”

“... many millions of pounds of public money. Arthur Andersen replied that the Government had been so keen to get public money into Northern Ireland that it had not investigated De Lorean properly. Ministers grew increasingly irritated as Arthur Andersen’s lawyers got hold of Cabinet minutes and even a statement from Margaret Thatcher. Relations between the ...”

“... today might well be surprised by its liveliness. As you’d expect, Theologus and Philagathus are keen on preaching, church attendance and private devotion, and take a hard line on ignorance and sin. Theologus preaches a standard predestinarian Calvinism, which at the turn of the 17th century had not yet taken on the anti-establishment associations it would ...”

“... spectacle’ in Paris and attempted to protect several Huguenot friends at some risk to himself. Keen to emphasise Walsingham’s high ideals, Cooper contrasts his choice of exile with the nicodemite conduct of his future colleague William Cecil, who opted for compromise when Mary came to the throne and even accepted the Mass in his private chapel to secure ...”

“... and is impossible to reconcile with his limited educational attainments – something Hale is very keen to emphasise. ‘No Renaissance artist, with the exception of Andrea Mantegna, was able to read or write Latin.’ This is a bold claim, considering how little we know about most artists of that period, and not hard to challenge (Alberti wrote a treatise in ...”

“... Thomas’s essential narrative of a culture becoming modern is derived in no small part from a keen appreciation of Hobbes’s scepticism. Even as social and cultural historians were establishing the power dynamics and belief systems of early modern England, another group of historians was turning to Hobbes in order to carve out a different agenda. Rather ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... and naturalist Thomas Jefferson, who cherished a vision of prehistoric American greatness and were keen to establish that America had indeed once supported giants. What happened in Madrid had an enduring significance: it was ‘the first reconstruction of an entire extinct animal’, long before reconstructed dinosaurs, mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers ...”

“... 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 only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”