“... to his treatment of character, where the rigidity of his preconceptions undermined what he took to be his discoveries, it is not illogical that he should in general have enjoyed a critical free pass where he was weakest. Scholarship is one thing, readership another. Contrast in the reception of the two writers is not confined to the volume of academic ...”

“... the Ohio Browning has met. Reviewing its first two volumes, one of its severest critics, the late John Pettigrew, found that they didn’t make him want to modify the statement that ‘there is nothing remotely like a good scholarly edition of the works.’ It was, in fact, the problems of the Ohio Browning that made the editors of the Oxford Browning turn ...”

“... over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended some of these jottings to the end of ‘Juneteenth’, the ‘novel’ he extracted from two thousand manuscript pages, he gave Ellison the last word: the final note reproaches the editor from beyond the grave, along with the readers ...”

“... Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there ...”

“... purposes. ‘The old physicians,’ Van Helsing’s colleague Dr Seward tells us darkly, ‘took account of things which their followers do not accept, and the professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be useful to us later’. It is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... to yourself,’ in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic ...”

“... stiff competition. Levi in his bibliography does not bother to mention studies by Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, Joanna Richardson and Susan Chitty, among others. He does, however, pay his warm respects to Vivien Noakes’s definitive Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, reissued 1985). Noakes has reviewed Levi’s book – ‘a joyous ...”

“... practice and linguistic innovation made social institutions viable. The lexical expansion ‘took root when botany teachers guided groups of schoolchildren in learning to know nature and distinguish between the various kinds of flowers: and vice versa: those distinctions could be made only with such names in hand. In other words, the social process of ...”

“... of a Notting Hill bookshop and a reader of Stendhal; her first novel A Start in Life (1981) took its title from Balzac and had a heroine whose life was ‘ruined by literature’. Nor is Rachel unusual in feeling a strong attraction towards people for whom comfort is more important than culture. In her case, the soothing solidity of the bourgeois is ...”

“... troops, Synghman Rhee’s openly-proclaimed ambitions and the coincidental presence of the hawkish John Foster Dulles in Seoul have been cited in evidence, but none of the works under review provides any substantiation for this interpretation. The scale and weight of the North Korean attack speaks for itself. And as Max Hastings properly reminds us, the United ...”

“... may be. Even if Mr Saatchi kept his firm’s fees low, which presumably he did not if he took no part in the arrangements, everyone who understands PR can see that this advertising campaign, which has humiliated one of the greatest educational institutions in Britain, has generated publicity for Saatchi and Saatchi. This is not the only obvious ...”

“... and with it the supply of those superbly expressive hysterics – such as Dora and Anna O. – who took starring roles in Freud’s casebook. What then is left of hysteria as a definable syndrome? Showalter admits that the line between hysterical symptoms and psychosomatic ones is unclear, but her own penchant for diagnosis at a distance seems to muddy the ...”

“... unmitigated heroism, perhaps most memorably embodied in that antique Glyndebourne recording with John Brownlee as the Don, remains a moving and impressive protest against the authority of the old over the young. Surely a Catholic opera would have shown Don Giovanni less courageous, more cringing and repentant. I offer such reservations, not as a severe ...”

“... Saladin, drank nothing stronger than sherbet. Later yet, in the 1260s, the Mamluk Sultan Baybars took steps to prevent the consumption of alcohol in his army. If Yasir Suleiman means that the history of the Crusades has been skewed by failure to make sufficient use of sources in Arabic, then he is certainly correct. Hillenbrand has performed a great service ...”