“... patient and subtle exposition is a continuing delight. After reading this first volume, several major misreadings of Burke and a more general ignorance of his arguments and actions will not be possible, or at any rate won’t be legitimate, by no means the same thing. The book is not intended as a guide to Burke’s personal and family life or to the ups ...”

“... Reagan’s speech-writer, a rant on modern television from Frederic Raphael, and views on editing (John Gross), Post-Structuralism (Alison Lurie) and computers. ‘Art’ in particular contains some notable essays, among them Walter Ong on subway graffiti, and the section opens with a splendidly passionate and ambitious piece by Margaret Doody on the revision ...”

“... the authors sadly make us doubt their scholarly credentials. Jo Gladstone’s interesting study of John Ray quotes a passage that she attributes to Bishop Wilkins when it is, in fact, from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, and elsewhere she says that Thomas Blount ‘first used the title term “hard words’ ” when, in fact, it appears in the title of the ...”

“... alone can fairly be regarded as one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought.’ This major revolution was the result of many factors. There were scientific and intellectual discoveries: the telescope expanded the heavens and diminished man in space, geological discoveries diminished man in time, the microscope brought out the complexity of ...”

“... so deeply divided, and so unstable, as to be on the brink of social disintegration, was given by John Stevenson and Chris Cook in The Slump.’ He immediately produces an ‘image’ – one of his book’s 149 illustrations – of the Jarrow Marchers. They look proud and determined. ‘But as the eye pans along to the left and we take in the British bobbie ...”

“... for any consideration of Boulez’s importance as a composer-writer needs to take into account the major items in Notes of an Apprenticeship. There is some overlap between Notes and Orientations. Relatively little in the new book matches the scale or temerity of the earlier pieces: it is more of a compilation of (perspicacious) sleeve-notes and the speeches of ...”

“... achievement – its very name a welcome embrace of the slogan with which the US secretary of state John Hay bid for a slice of the Chinese market after the American conquest of the Philippines. Or, as Vogel puts it in today’s boilerplate: ‘Under Deng’s leadership, China truly joined the world community, becoming an active part of international ...”

“... proprietary rights over territories ‘lost’ by incompetent Presidents or neglectful officials. John Stempel’s book Inside the Iranian Revolution exemplifies this attitude. As Deputy Chief of the Political Section of the US Embassy, Stempel served in Tehran during the critical years from 1975 to mid-1979, after the fall of the Shah, when most of the ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... circumstances’. The failure to address the health needs of detainees, Arnold concluded, is a major problem and detention itself is ‘frequently damaging to the health of detainees’. ‘The system of medical care at Yarl’s Wood and in those other detention centres we have visited,’ he said, ‘is incompetent, dishonest and brutal.’ In May ...”

“... the age’, as Neely puts it, ‘was that “race” mattered’; ‘racial beliefs’ were a ‘major determinant’ of behaviour in the era of the Civil War. We therefore need to recalibrate our assessment of the violence between white protagonists so as to open our eyes to the far darker realities of ethnic division. And furthermore – though he ...”

“... and bathrooms, a small dormitory for servants, a safe and a ‘radio capable of receiving all the major European stations’. It was exhibited at the 1925 Salon de l’auto in Paris, where it drew discriminating attention. The vehicle was called a roulotte, a fact which must have delighted its owner, fascinated as he was by chance recombinations of language ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... hard in other senses too: resistant, tough-minded, impartial and impassive.Probably before the major novels, though the work is undatable, Austen wrote an excellent unromantic story. ‘Lady Susan’ is the epistolary account, at novella length, of a charming and rather brilliant (though bad) woman’s amatory adventures in stuffy aristocratic ...”