“... Hotel, Love Story – which is read by everyone for a while and then sinks into limbo. Have such best-sellers anything in common? Obviously they are not – like War and Peace, say – hardy perennials. Their appeal is to something specific in the temper of the time. Going with that, perhaps, is a capacity to have their cake and eat it, and to give their ...”

“... reduced the master’s subtle and varied manner to a set of imitable and parodiable mannerisms, at best merely clever, at worst tediously posturing and repetitious. How best to advise the English reader wishing to get the measure of Petrarch has always been problematical. Happily, these two new books should change that. It ...”

“... covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though not, as I hear it, self-vaunting) ‘Je n’ai rien négligé.’ But the rose on the unlovely pebble also reminds me of Poussin’s habit of bringing ...”

“... in its earliest phases where other evidence was lacking.In 1809, Payne Knight published what Nicholas Penny has called ‘the first significant work of art history undertaken in the English language’ in the form of the preliminary essay for the Society of Dilettanti’s Specimens of Antient Sculpture: Aegyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman. The ...”

“... opposition. He was a friend to Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay and many of the Pléiade company; to Nicholas de Grouchy, the editor of Aristotle, Elie Vinet the mathematician and cosmographer, Peter Ramus, Henri Estienne, his collaborator and printer in a variety of works, and to Julius Caesar Scaliger, who held him in high regard. As these connections ...”

“... of his life in England. The influence of their work slowly began to be felt: court artists such as Nicholas Hilliard were shaped by their admiration for Holbein, and by the 1570s refugee artists from the Netherlands were inspiring many now unknown English painters to attempt greater tonal subtlety and more complex compositions. Native practices began to merge ...”

“... The theme of Britain under Nazi occupation has already produced a shelf of fiction, much the best being Len Deighton’s SS-GB. Now the idea can be extended, made more topical. This new satire by Kingsley Amis – a ‘melodrama’, as he calls it – treats of England under the Russian boot, something worth paying a high price in blood to avoid (and ...”

“... of Adultery, Illustrated with Cuts. He also sought out drama, printing several of Aphra Behn’s best-known comedies: The Feign’d Curtizans, Sir Patient Fancy, part two of The Rover. His first big success came when, after borrowing money to buy the copyright in Dryden’s 1679 version of Troilus and Cressida, he started publishing his new work, notably the ...”

“... age of 70, we learn from the intimate and largely unpublished letters that are the raw material of Nicholas Fox Weber’s biography, Le Corbusier was still justifying his work, his name and his fame to his mother, by then in her late nineties. As always, he was trying to gain her favour over his (only just) older brother, the gentle but troubled Albert, a ...”

“... such as Donald Winch – has emerged during a period when the history of economics has become at best semi-detached from economics as a discipline. Nevertheless, there remain some historically inclined economists with a keen nose for anachronism who question whether it is appropriate to associate Smith with laissez-faire or the Industrial Revolution or with ...”

“... a reputation out of all proportion to the number of buildings they put up, is one of Cooke’s best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her way in a masculine environment by behaving like a man, only more so. Cooke is careful to avoid special ...”

“... We still​ do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for,’ Nicholas Stargardt announces at the outset of his ambitious and absorbing new book, ‘or how they managed to continue their war until the bitter end.’ This is not for want of trying: numerous historians have analysed German opinion and behaviour at every stage of the Second World War, using above all the Meldungen aus dem Reich, the regular confidential reports on civilian morale made by SS Security Service and local and regional government officials, together with diaries and correspondence, especially field-post letters to and from soldiers at the front, to chart the diverse and changing attitudes to victory and defeat ...”

“... from the laws of libel. (I happen to be travelling in the opposite direction.) More than half of Nicholas Garland’s book is given over to an account of demoralisation and defection at the Telegraph, and the whole of Watkins’s effort is an education in the nightmare of the Queen’s Bench. Garland approaches the relationship between politics and ...”

“... borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly knows of them, and indeed, in the end, agrees with them (except about book titles). Still, whatever historians may say, legends of King Arthur have remained deep-rooted in popular imagination, giving rise to ...”

“... his weekly school letter and gave it to the headmaster to read, revise and encypher. Professor Nicholas, the editor, fawns and bows, proclaims those despatches written in Berlin’s absence to be ‘school of Berlin’: but he cannot get away from the fact that, deprived of the right to portray personalities, express opinions, or be funny, Theseus puts up ...”