“... compounds within each major camp: 18,168 in one month at Bergen-Belsen – including Anne Frank – out of a population of around 45,000. In one last spasm the SS killed more Jews and high-value prisoners: foreign agents and German opponents of the regime like the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some prisoners murdered one another out of the ...”

“... feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... necessarily, Friedman is much less sure of his ground. He places too much emphasis on the story of Frank Machon, the Glasgow haulier, who as early as 1988 spotted (and wrote to inform Prime Minister Thatcher) that end-user certificates for arms to Saudi Arabia and Jordan were being forged to disguise the arms’ real destination: Iraq. Machon is an important ...”

“... odd errors: Waterhouse at the time was employed at the Zoological Society, not the British Museum; Thomas Bell, who described Darwin’s reptiles, was not a ‘physician’ but a dentist – and medical politics in the 1830s made that a wide divide. It’s a pity, in an industry where Darwin’s every word is scrupulously dated and documented, that the ...”

“... as an ancestor by the present generation of Northern Irish poets. You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for ...”

“... which is mainly concerned with England, and such saints as Hugh of Lincoln, William of Norwich and Thomas of Canterbury, does not neglect the politics of canonisation, which has been the subject of several recent studies. Professor Gabrielle Spiegel, for example, has shown how the monks of St Denis and the kings of France collaborated to encourage the cult of ...”

“... actors and readers’, and the complicated webs of feeling set up among them. With Thomas Hardy, she concentrates largely on the Napoleonic Wars novel, The Trumpet Major, a work which she has elsewhere done much to raise in the canon. Dedicated to a company of Hardy’s fellow teachers at London University, this book seems to have grown out of ...”

“... subtitled ‘A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from S.T. Coleridge to Thomas Mann’) – McCormack’s contribution to Across a Roaring Hill, a collection of essays on ‘the Protestant imagination in modern Ireland’. In both these undertakings, the short and the long one, McCormack shows a salutary urge to acknowledge all the ...”

“... in hushed tones of his own encounter with a ghost, we treat the story as evidence of just how ‘frank’ our friend is being rather than as prima facie evidence that he is fibbing. But if such distortions of judgment are the consequences of belief, where does that belief begin? I think it begins with the fear of being seen to be an unbeliever. In a culture ...”

“... Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches ...”

“... to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan belatedly finding much to approve in G.R. Elton on Thomas Cromwell, or J.H. Plumb on Walpole. Whether Elton or Plumb would be pleased about the use he makes of them is another matter: Anderson, by the way, has a highly penetrating assessment of Walpole as Thompson’s bug-in-chief. So what special insights have ...”

“... who might with reason feel a sense of grievance at Davis’s historiographical bugaboo is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and ...”

“... secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These are people who believe that the first ...”

“... an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’. Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as ...”