“... who light dirty and are sanctimonious about it: Lydia Lawrence and Meyers’s other bête noire, John Middleton Murry. Murry perhaps deserves what he gets (though one still wonders why Lawrence stuck to him for so long); but Lydia gets a biographical third degree. Her father is said to have ‘described himself as an engineer’ while actually being ‘a ...”

“... Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though three names appear upon the title page, they have pooled their intellectual capital to a ...”

“... Chandra Roy (who was made a CBE), and Ganguli’s name was unknown. The curse is working (as Anna Russell used to say of Wagner’s Ring). John Smith, earlier the author of a fine translation and study of the medieval Hindi Epic of Pabuji, is the latest to take up the challenge. He may escape the curse because his version ...”

“... he insisted they should not be kept from the world and a manuscript was sent to their friend Mary Russell Mitford in Reading with instructions to print a very limited number of copies. These slim volumes, bearing the title Sonnets by E.B.B., then seem to have disappeared from view, parcelled up with some of Mitford’s other books and papers at her death ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... books have not survived. Yet he was a man of many gifts. Leonard Woolf, who knew what Keynes and Russell could do, recalled a meeting of Labour sympathisers with Gandhi in London, where he had been bowled over by ‘one of the most brilliant intellectual pyrotechnic displays I have ever listened to’: Harold ... gave the most lucid, faultless summary of ...”

“... Willson, who in 1842 designed a brick and granite sepulchral pyramid with a base area the size of Russell Square to be built on Primrose Hill. Its 94 levels (topped by an observatory) would be ‘sufficiently capacious to receive five millions of the dead, where they may repose in perfect security’. The scheme foundered, but if anyone feels like reviving ...”

“... of the conflicts in a group that has included Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, James Hum ham and Russell Kirk perhaps overstresses the origin of these conflicts in individual idiosyncrasies. For conflict and contradiction are at the heart of the principles of American intellectual conservatism. Some of its adherents are would-be followers of Burke in their ...”

“... organisation with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism. Half a century later, Cobb County elected a John Bircher to Congress five times; it is now represented by Newt Gingrich. Although a 1967 Supreme Court decision finally overturned the Georgia state law that barred racial intermarriage, in 1986 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia statute outlawing consensual ...”

“... a sinister beauty and the power to inspire wonder. Botting cannot resist borrowing for an epigraph John Masefield’s tribute to the great sailing ships: ‘They mark our passage as a race of men,/Earth will not see such ships as these again.’ This lively book is a zeppelin history which concentrates on the round-the-world voyage of the Graf Zeppelin in ...”

“... the horror. No sooner had Scotland failed to qualify than I was moved to treat my friends to John Steinbeck’s comment to Jacqueline Kennedy: ‘You talked of Scotland as a lost cause,’ he said, ‘and that is not true. Scotland is an unwon cause.’ Bloody hell. Better make mine a double. Five minutes later I was thinking about Ireland and five ...”

“... ways of thinking, including – or maybe especially – Labour home secretaries. Blunkett and John Reid certainly did. But Theresa May’s long tenure (six years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office suggests that the mindset may have deepened in her case or meshed better with her pre-existing worldview. This includes a powerful resentment towards the ...”

“... eye to be led by Brandt. Ray-Jones may have shared his subjects with Donald McGill or Ken Russell but his compositions of simultaneous actions by competing players are stolen from a different world.They are translations. Here is a material example of the ‘alienation’ that possesses multiple meanings from Brecht onwards so that Hatherley was bound ...”

“... of Henry Lawson’s 1892 classic. Bail approaches Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ through Russell Drysdale’s well-known painting of the same name. In Lawson, the wife finds a strength of her own while maintaining a firm sense of connection with her absent drover husband. In Bail, the wife has run off with the drover, abandoning her suburban dentist ...”

“... gang of vicious and often drunken thugs, murderers and fornicators’) to the novels of John Updike. In the old days – stretching from the 12th century to the Second World War – there was marriage and there was adultery (or thoughts of adultery): on the one hand, stability, a house and a dowry; on the other, longing, desire and despair. This ...”