“... gives a view of the presidency as seen from the private quarters (where most of the recordings took place) rather than the West Wing, and it turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Of course, that may have been the point of these conversations, which Clinton set up with his old friend Branch (they had been roommates ...”

“... exercises in persuasion, adjust his convictions, and perhaps distort them, to tactical ends. John Aubrey, a friend, wrote that Marvell was ‘of very few words’, and that though he stoked his muse with wine he was careful not to give himself away by drinking in company. Yet he had a violent temper which got him into humiliating trouble in the Commons ...”

“... illusion that Burke was the lackey of the rich and powerful. From first to last, he stuck up for John Wilkes and the cause of liberty. He drily recognised Wilkes’s failings: ‘There has been no hero of the mob but Wilkes’; ‘He is not ours, and if he were, is little to be trusted. He is a lively agreeable man, but of no prudence and no ...”

“... was over, and therefore of little concern. Fatefully, as Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood show, this was also the way many non-European peoples were seen: as relics to be overhauled or replaced.The hundred-year period that began around 1870 also witnessed the birth and growth of sociology, the discipline most preoccupied with ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... committee trying to investigate the deal, Feinstein lasted only three months: the story itself took 18 months to unfold – inevitably, the account he gives is incomplete. The moment of truth for Feinstein should have come earlier, over Aids. He recounts with horror the scene in the ANC parliamentary caucus when Mbeki gave his lecture on Big Pharma and ...”

“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...”

“... to enter the kingdom of God.’ The twenty-year-old Melania and her husband, Valerius Pinianus, took Christ at his word. They interpreted their dream as divine encouragement to follow the equally challenging injunction: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’ But this was no ...”

“... After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and did a deal with Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd of London and Liverpool, selling them two thousand barrels of Burmese oil a month. In 1885, the British ...”

“... Pollock was distancing himself from Benton. Some time in the late Thirties he began to frequent John Graham, that most mysterious of all the gurus of European Modernism. Graham took him up, reinforcing his faith in unconscious imagery. From now on, Pollock transferred his admiration and his envy to Picasso, enlarging his ...”

“... Exactly a hundred years ago, Aby Warburg took a short walk on what proved to be a long pier. In his doctoral dissertation on Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, he used fewer than fifty packed pages to analyse the two paintings. He treated them as a set because Vasari had seen them both at Duke Cosimo’s villa, Castello, and described them together ...”

“... and her husband had shared at a station buffet on their honeymoon half a century earlier: ‘He took all the white and left me the green.’ A way of life rich in matured rancour. Sartre also records how his paternal grandfather, a country doctor, discovered on the day after his wedding that his wife’s family – supposedly rich Périgord landowners ...”

“... and is probably the greatest novelty. In some respects it is a very odd compilation. Back in 1960 John Russell Brown wrote an article, celebrated in the trade, in which he argued against the value of old-spelling Shakespeare, saying among other things that the amount of ‘silent alteration’ an editor would have to introduce would make such a text almost ...”

“... It took sixty years for the supporters of Crossrail, the new railway being built under London, to convince Parliament it was worth the investment. Recession scuppered the project twice, in the 1970s and 1990s, and slowed it down again in 2009: it was supposed to be finished in time for the Olympics, then budget cuts forced the completion date forward to 2018 ...”