“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... scientific travellers – including Darwin, who was deeply influenced by Humboldt’s example and took his books with him when he embarked on his own voyage of discovery thirty years later. Humboldt lived for more than fifty years after his return to Europe in 1804. Though he often contemplated other expeditions he made only one more extended journey, a ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... on this occasion were the rioters themselves, killed by troops, or by gentleman volunteers like John Wilkes, or by the raw alcohol they looted from Catholic-owned distilleries. Food rioters, too, only rarely inflicted serious injury on the farmers, shopkeepers and middlemen whose prices they protested against. And industrial rioters were far more likely to ...”

“... that abilities as spontaneous and exuberant as his could be kept unfailingly under tight control. John Hay commented from New Hampshire, after Kipling had paid him a three-day visit in 1895: ‘How a man can keep up so intense an intellectual life without going to Bedlam is amazing. He rattled off the framework of about forty stories while he was with ...”

“... protector of Israel. Saddam’s War and Unholy Babylon have been put together with great speed. John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, the authors of the first book, and Adel Darwish, one of the authors of the second, all write for the Independent, and regular readers of that paper will not find in Saddam’s War much (except for the earlier history, whose ...”

“... accumulators which had to be carried to the shop to be recharged, and whose acid, if spilled, took the colour out of carpets and the polish off the sideboard; battery sets nevertheless remained in demand even when most people had mains electricity, because wall points were sparely provided, often only one per house. Mains sets were heavily promoted by the ...”

“... was lodged in the greater prison of Colchester, that ‘grim and strong fortress’; this time it took him a fortnight to break out, which he did ‘vi et armis videlicet gladiis langodebeves et daggariis ... et sic extra eandem gaolam felonice ... evaserit’, ‘by armed force, that is to say with swords, daggers and langues de boeuf, and so feloniously ...”

“... relation between the colour and the wing. It is instructive to compare this argument, which took Berkeley all the way to perceptual idealism, with the argument which in this century has taken some people some of the way with him. Berkeley refuses to allow that there are any mental particulars to be qualified by perceptible qualities. This gives his ...”

“... in how to write about crime need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those ...”

“... of historical approaches that sought to ‘read’ politics off social structure. His students took these lessons to heart, but he was moving in another direction. In the last decade, Stedman Jones has in essence become yet another Cambridge historian of political thought, concerned, especially in his 2004 book, An End to Poverty?, to recapture the ...”

“... much in the book to justify it. It is an impressively learned, scrupulously detailed study of John Cleland, author of one of the most salacious pieces of fiction in the English language; but it is no disrespect to Hal Gladfelder to wonder whether the Johns Hopkins press would have been quite so eager to take on an erudite study of an obscure 18th-century ...”

“... ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children were lifted up in the air. Most of all, a ...”

“... the most tenacious champions of Trump’s decision have been the neoconservatives, from John Bolton to Paul Wolfowitz, who took us to war in Iraq. In the National Review, John Yoo, author of the torture memos, defended the legality of the assassination; Thomas Friedman ...”

“... learning of the Gelehrter bordered on reverence (the German terms are appropriate since Renan took so much of his inspiration from German thought and scholarship). Above all, he celebrated the ‘vocation’ of the scholar, complete with its religious connotations, an impersonal dedication to truth that raised one above the petty fripperies of partisan ...”