“... history of nighttime, which draws on accounts of the dark in early modern Europe. In a recent LRB John Demos pondered the perils of popular history, in which events constantly drive the story onwards, in which interpretations receive short shrift, in which character and personality trump situation and circumstance. Ekirch has written a book that anybody with ...”

“... that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank account. Many believe that such malpractice ...”

“... merely to be pure in heart. Before long, Isherwood too was waving this phrase about as a panacea. John Layard was revered as the one man who was pure in heart, who was therefore without guilt or fear, and consequently unable to contract disease, and who was profoundly, fundamentally happy. When Auden told Isherwood that in Berlin were to be found not only ...”

“... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John Stuart Mill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from such equiphobia as well – or rather, that ...”

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”

“... the docks by leaping over the flames (as one jumps over the bonfire to fend off evil spirits on St John’s night), and he and his best friend, Luís Terranova, an extrovert tango singer and his temperamental opposite, go into hiding for the rest of the war. Some time later Luís is taken as a sexual pet by the local censor, Commander Dez, who, like many of ...”

“... that I would have to end it, if I couldn’t get my sentences sorted. Eventually I sorted them and took the piece to the Statesman’s office in Great Turnstile. When Karl had read it he said: ‘You’re a writer now.’ He was liable to make patriarchal remarks of that kind, and for better or worse – either way it’s a confession – I was very ...”

“... three ambitious histories of the region. His fourth book, McMafia, examined how the underworld took advantage of globalisation in the 1990s, establishing partnerships and franchises in the manner of their corporate counterparts. In DarkMarket, Glenny traces a virtual landscape that maps onto familiar political geography, explaining, for instance, how the ...”

“... concerns of the one-time infant prodigy who, after his youthful dalliance with ideology, took his manager wife and their eight children on an upward social trajectory, seem to have been hard work and sound professional practice. A self-portrait of 1880, requested of the maestro by the Uffizi, records a bland incurious glance at the mirror; but that ...”

“... the latter. Butler also wants to argue, however, that although a recognisably modern society took shape in America during the ‘provincial decades’ following initial colonisation (1680-1770), the distinctive traits, attitudes and habits of mind that formed the ‘American character’ came later. Here he agrees with Appleby, who suggests that the ...”

“... she was a showgirl and moved into his flat, though they never had sex, not with each other. He took her to dinner parties where lords and ladies hurried through their desserts so that they could undress and orgify before Keeler had to leave for her parading and hostessing duties at Murray’s, a classy strip club. She accompanied him, stopping sometimes on ...”

“... the Duke of Windsor will resume his throne and Henry Williamson replace the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. If these instructions and predictions derive from a genuine document, then that document is Audenesque. But Auden’s voice can be heard in less fantastic moments: the lights of a car sweeping across a bedroom, as in that fine early poem later ...”

“... part of the Northwest Passage, the so-called ‘Arctic Grail’. From Martin Frobisher in 1576 to John Franklin in 1845, generations of European explorers searched for a navigable route through the Arctic islands to Asia. Many of them – including Franklin and his men – died in the attempt. Their greatest challenge was sea-ice, which has almost always ...”

“... In 1944 and 1945, John Brinckerhoff Jackson surveyed the French and German countryside for the advancing US army. At the military intelligence training centre in Maryland, Jackson had been taught to see the territory he surveyed as an empty stage on which certain choreographed actions were to be performed, and others improvised in the event that the enemy, or the land itself, threw up surprises ...”

“... as when he cheats against an opponent in a duel: Before I could see the whites of his eyes I took aim and burnt off the priming powder on the pan lid. My opponent, assuming my musket had misfired and the touch-hole would be blocked, charged straight at me, pistol in hand, all too eager to make me pay for my presumption. Before he realised what was ...”