“... 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 ...”

“... than 9; Tony Benn is leader of the opposition; the Poll Tax has been introduced a decade early; John Lennon is still alive; and personal computers have already been around for twenty years or more. Intercity trains are fast (London to Glasgow in 75 minutes) because Thatcher is ‘fanatical about public transport’, but the trains themselves are ...”

“... shows a murky sea bottom with a section of tube that looks like marine junk. Here, as the curator John Jacob points out in his excellent essay in the Smithsonian publication, Paglen works against the obfuscation of terms like ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the cloud’; in his own words, Paglen aims to ‘rematerialise the network’ and thereby ‘to expand the ...”

“... Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded. k: I see you do be writing for a paper called the New Yorker. me: I do. k: I dare say for a piece in a paper like that you might get big money. me: Begod, you might. k: I dare say you might get $500. me: You ...”

“... the centre of Chichester, where the Seven Deadly Sins had staked out appropriate shops (Gluttony took over the Real Cornish Pasty Company); in the cathedral, the damnation of Samuel West’s Faustus was staged at the high altar. But since the first half of the play was staged in the Minerva Theatre, it still only played to a maximum of three hundred ...”

“... system as it struggles to grow fast enough to accommodate increases in numbers. Yet that expansion took place relatively smoothly and without much evidence that quality was sacrificed to quantity. Difficult categories of young people have been incorporated into the system. For example, not very long ago, severely handicapped children were considered ineducable ...”

“... picketing, striking, rioting. And thousands went further, especially after Bloody Sunday, and took up the gun. Even with hindsight, I cannot say that Republicans who resorted to arms were acting ‘irrationally’: their response bore a clear relation to the actions of the state against their communities. Looking through newspaper articles of the time, I ...”

“... Disraeli, mightily put out at the send-up of Coningsby, never spoke to Thackeray again and took his revenge in a later novel. Friends of Thackeray told him that he was losing caste as a novelist by working for Punch, but he needed the money badly – Vanity Fair did not come out until 1847. The Fat Contributor’s finances plummeted when he lost £500 ...”

“... Small, Good Thing’. I think that they did a good job too. KB: A few weeks ago I saw the film of John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’. RC: Isn’t that just a wonderful film? I saw it when it first came out, and I talked to John Cheever about it. We were teaching together in Iowa. He claimed he just ...”

“... arrogant display of budget that speaks of royal visitations, the finish of the London Marathon, or John Major on walkabout, prospecting for inner-city blight. But on this unearned, mint morning, the fuss is all about real royalty, indigenous royalty: one of our local princes of darkness, a cashmere colonel, is about to be boxed. A mob of expectant necrophiles ...”