“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... is capable of drawing a line from, say, the Warburgian theorising of the retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes to the biopolitics of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral ...”

“... and by 1953 had established a reputation as a biographer. Two volumes on the life of Richard Monckton-Milnes, the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... washed up at Preston in Sussex, Lady Shirley asked her steward to send them up to London ‘so we may drink it, which will end the dispute with the commissions of the customs’.When goods went missing it was always easy to blame the people who actually heaved them from the sea. Sir John Killigrew, who held the right to wrecks on the Lizard peninsula, faced ...”

“... contributions made, mostly in the Stalin period, by agents of nerve and cunning. These included Richard Sorge, the spy who penetrated the Japanese foreign office to provide his government with the clearest possible warning of a German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941; Teodor Maly, the Hungarian-born agent who spotted Kim Philby’s talents in mid-Thirties ...”

“... He takes us through the psychology of vision by a route familiar to anyone who has read Richard Gregory. There follows a brief account of neuroanatomy in general and the primate visual system in particular, where he has been somewhat upstaged by the superb new book by the visual physiologist Semir Zeki, A Vision of the Brain.* In fact, it is only ...”

“... that they were all dead. The volume of essays, edited by Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas in honour of Richard Cobb, deals mostly with the later years of the Revolution, between the fall of Robespierre and the advent of Bonaparte. The period has always been rather an embarrassment to historians who are looking for patterns. If the Terror represented some kind of ...”

“... it all: he became involved in the politics of 1848, made a speech attacking the Court, and in May 1849 appeared on the barricades alongside Bakunin. By chance (again) he escaped being imprisoned and thus avoided a likely death sentence. The rest of Mein Leben describes Wagner’s exile, spent mostly in Switzerland, but with interludes in ...”

“... as self-reliant, smart and funny. Just when you’ve had more than enough reflections on why Richard Dawkins is probably, unhelpfully, right, Mrs Barnes steps in with a put-down. As an adolescent I once hid a tape recorder under the table during dinner in an attempt to prove that, far from it being the ‘social event’ my mother decreed every meal ...”

“... Indeed, they are dark, smelly, dank passageways where, as Oscar Newman … argued, “crime may occur more frequently than elsewhere.”’ Robin Hood Gardens​ coincided with what John Boughton describes as a ‘golden age of council house building’, but in Municipal Dreams he doesn’t include it in his ‘pantheon’, ‘despite the affection in ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... I write as I type, or I type as I write (do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?). ‘Whatever they may do,’ the bibliographer Roger Stoddard has noted, ‘authors do not write books.’ Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell take up the distinction and declare that their volume will focus ‘on the representation, self-representation and non-representation, in ...”

“... them: Frank would have had a hard time keeping the heir to Marple Hall in line. Oedipal gratitude may account for Isherwood’s later attachment to Berlin and young Germans of military age. With his father dead, his mother, Kathleen, became the focus of his youthful repudiations. His break for freedom was devastating for the family members he left ...”

“... said, ‘but there’s something missing. You could call it moral responsibility.’ The bombers may have been bound together by a conviction they were working ‘in the name of Allah’, but they did not heed the second half of the prayer which Muslims are supposed to say as they begin any significant action: ‘In the name of Allah, the most ...”