“... wars, the eruption of 1794 was, at least from a cartoonist’s point of view, fortuitous.John Brewer’s large and somewhat rambling survey of the cultural significance of Vesuvius begins with an attempt to draw a single thread from this tangled story. He starts with a visitors’ book, now in the Harvard library, which covers the period from ...”

“... steals The Magnificent Seven not through hat-waving and underplaying, but because he laid siege to John Sturges to persuade him to increase the size of his role, and was charming and animated on-screen while everyone else was busy being dour. Charles Bronson and James Coburn were underplaying each other into inanimacy; Brynner was playing Gary Cooper. McQueen ...”

“... though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more palatable to academia: King’s College, London has a ...”

“... talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad ...”

“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”

“... to the ideas that were turning that world upside down. This is the Irvine of the novelist John Galt, who was born at a house in the High Street in 1779. He was the son of a sea-captain, and he didn’t keep well, but as a child he scurried around this changing locality, chasing the world that was going, and greeting the new one coming in. His ...”

“... of English metrics, the nature of lyric. By any measure this book (Prins’s first) is a debut of major ambition and considerable achievement. Still, Prins’s concerns are rhetorical – even deconstructionist – rather than psycho-biographical, and she pursues them in a manner that the Sapphically-inclined Sapphist will no doubt find off-putting. The study ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... was not always in compliance with the law or legal standards of the time. It is true, as Ann and John Tusa argue in their definitive study of the Nuremberg trials, that the court was deliberately constituted as a military tribunal and was therefore exempt from the rigorous conditions of a civil court. There can be little excuse, however, for its adoption of ...”

“... the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. ‘The Circus’, it’s worth recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via Spain. Aged nineteen, he enlisted ...”

“... and others. Indeed Eliot, rejecting the 1890s reading of Baudelaire, had made himself the major exponent of that author as a fierce moralist as well as the poet of ‘l’immonde cité’, and Baudelaire’s book has its share of horrors, shudders and shadows. Huysmans, a disciple of Baudelaire, was admired by Eliot, and it might be said that his A ...”

“... be counted on to behave with moderation and good sense. But as Ferdinando Malvica, author of a major unpublished contemporary chronicle of the Palermitan revolution pointed out, the streets soon also filled with armed maestranze (members of craftsmen’s corporations) and, more disturbingly, with squads from the surrounding countryside: these, he ...”

“... relatively simple one of whether no means no or yes, but what else even a genuine no might mean. John Forrester puts the matter very well in Dispatches from the Freud Wars (1997) when he asks how we tell the difference between ‘a patient’s independent judgment of psychoanalysis’ and ‘a negative transference’. ‘That is the fundamental problem in ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... For some in the audience, this was more than enough. ‘That means nigger citizenship,’ John Wilkes Booth told his companions. Three nights later, he followed the president to Ford’s Theatre and shot him in the head. On the morning of 11 April, Lincoln met privately with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. The subject of the meeting went ...”