“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... in the desert south of Las Vegas. (‘Boulder, not Hoover,’ I hear him growling.) The geographer Richard Walker and I had been teaching a seminar at Berkeley on ‘consumer society’ and we were ending term with a field trip to Vegas, and wanted Davis to meet us there. He was doubtful, for reasons easily guessed; he only began to soften when he heard that ...”

“... technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering the Hejaz in 1926, he allowed Jeddah’s foreign community to import alcohol openly: he was forced to end this concession when the British consul, who used to serve drinks to his Saudi guests, was shot dead by a drunken young prince. Since ...”

“... history: the rise of the pacifist civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King in the mid-Fifties. The account is artless, engaging, funny, moving and disturbing by turns; each chapter is thematically focused (religion, love/sex, politics, playing hardball, family life, black/white styles of cooking, the ritual of ...”

“... with great promptitude by G.N. Clark in the Thirties, held up by the war, and finished with A.J.P. Taylor’s extra volume on 1914-45, does not much ring in the mind, except for its first two volumes (Collingwood and Myres, and Stenton) and Taylor’s. I doubt if the new one will fare any better. John Roberts, the general editor, does not show his hand in ...”

“... and in particular of the potentially disastrous consequences of farting in a space vehicle. Richard Olney, an American expert on food and wine who has lived in France since 1951, has many qualities, but humour is not one. The second and revised edition of The French Menu Cookbook contains the same catholic selection of recipes as the first, but has ...”

“... of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he urged that these courts be brought under the control of the King in Parliament, More had to tread warily. The great question of the English Reformation, the royal claim to be supreme head of the Church in England, was at issue. He knew what might be in store for him in this world, and he feared what might be his lot in ...”

“... Who could have invented Eisenhower, he asked, and no sooner had he invented a caricature of Richard Nixon in Our Gang than Nixon turned out to be caricaturing himself in the same way, locker-room slang and all. ‘No a man’s character isn’t his fate,’ Roth writes in Operation Shylock: ‘a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his ...”

“... of the royal prerogative, that has shaped the British constitution.In 1636 a London trader called Richard Chambers sued the mayor for having wrongfully imprisoned him for refusing to pay ship money. His case was that the tax was itself unlawful, having been levied by the Crown without the authority of Parliament. The court refused to hear the ...”

“... familiar to Charles V. Indeed, the basic attitudes could have been traced back to the days when Richard I and Philip Augustus had ignored Papal attempts to prevent them from fighting over the Vexin. Nor is the constitutional contrast between France and Spain as clear as was once thought. The late Professor J.W. Daly has ...”

“... 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the ...”

“... of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make the tactical error of ...”

“... context. It is, nevertheless, from a work which is in some ways close in spirit to Skinner, Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories, that the most penetrating recent criticism of Warrender has come. Of the trio of Hobbes scholars I mentioned above, Oakeshott is the one whose ideas stand most in need of further development today, for he is one of the ...”

“... and the ordinary concerns of life, where work is work and the word ‘tragedy’ connotes not King Lear but cancer or a child run over or a train crash, are intrusive, unwelcome and strange. Has it always been so? And has this limitation of interest necessarily had a bad effect on the chronicler’s prose? It seems once to have been otherwise. The memoirs ...”

“... the Sheriff of Nottingham. He is an archer of genius and a master of disguise. He is loyal to the king, and ‘dyde pore men moch god’, but he had no time for the wealthy and grasping religious orders: the Gest begins with the story of how Robin helped an impoverished knight pay his debt to the abbot of St Mary’s York, and fleeced the abbey in the ...”