“... he is now remembered. The story of the three trials is the superbly dramatic centrepiece of Ben Wilson’s fine new biography of Hone, the first for nearly a century. It tells many more stories besides: that, for example, of the brilliant investigative journalism by which Hone sought to vindicate the serving-maid Eliza Fenning, hanged for attempting to ...”

“... When they arrived they were tested on a field rented by one of the Committee, Walter Gordon Wilson, a specialist in gearboxes and a brilliant mechanical engineer. Swinton had the initial vision: Wilson made it into reality. In June 1915 Swinton, still unaware of the existence of the Landships Committee, wrote a ...”

“... powers – ‘one of the worst and one of the most influential ideas around’, in the opinion of David Starkey in 2019. Hobbes describes it in Leviathan as ‘a doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth … That the sovereign power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth but to Dissolve it? For ...”

“... such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His book is also part of a more general attempt to rethink the meaning of the Great War and ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”

“... pygmies compared to the Labour leadership contest that took place the following year. When Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister the candidates lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party ...”

“... the RAF (the French call it Scalp). The Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation signed by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy at their summit on 2 November specifically anticipates Anglo-French collaboration on ‘an assessment of enhancements to the Scalp/Storm Shadow cruise missiles’ and joint development ‘of the equipment and technologies for the ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... unpredictable preferences of the lay members of the committee – what might be called the Mary Wilson factor. At the heart of the Booker process is the assumption that where the novel is concerned, all celebrities (whatever the source of their celebrity) are experts. No one would appoint Julia Neuberger, distinguished person though she is, to judge a ...”

“... and have close parallels in the work of more prosaic Glaswegian architects, such as Charles Wilson, whose Free Church College of 1855-7 also features a portico raised above a high base and highlighted by towers. What distinguishes Thomson from even his most talented contemporaries, such as John Burnet Sr, or the Gothically inclined J.J. Stevenson, is ...”

“... brings together the science warriors – Sokal, the Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Kenneth Wilson, and their fellow physicists Jean Bricmont and David Mermin – with a selective group of the targets of their criticism: sociologists and social historians of science rather than, for example, literary or cultural ...”

“... in 1976 to interest some officers at a Sandhurst dinner to ‘stand for Britain’ against Harold Wilson and the political class generally. His reception was so frosty that he went home early. Civil-military relations in Britain are no problem. Army-society relations are another matter, and one that has long been as important to the British as to any other ...”

“... incantation, Orphic music: all moved him into the frenzy necessary for self-dissolution.Edward Wilson-Lee’s The Grammar of Angels takes up Pico’s interest in ecstatic states. It’s not a biography of Pico (too bad, since we could do with a fresh one in English) but a wide-ranging cultural history of mesmeric sound, from Plato to the ...”

“... to laugh at a person, than to do him any real injury’. As the Elizabethan humanist Thomas Wilson wrote, ‘the occasion of laughter and the mean that maketh us merry … is the fondness, the filthiness, the deformity, and all such evil behaviour as we see to be in other[s].’ In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton made the same point from ...”