“... British history is very English: written mainly by the English and about England. But Trevor Burridge is a Welshman by birth and a citizen of Canada. He teaches at the French-speaking University of Montreal. One might expect, therefore, that he would bring to English history an outsider’s sense of disbelief, or the cheeky irreverence of an iconoclast ...”

“... us of the role of economic development in our history, and force home the fact that there can be no true separation of economic history from other histories. The dates bounding the Checklands’ volume in the New History of Scotland might seem to be ones of political significance primarily, but 1832 and 1914 mark very ...”

“... an interviewer recently that though he often felt the urge to write for the stage he was put off by the scrutiny to which he would be subjected: and the pun in the title of his autobiography was a precaution against exposure. It proved less necessary than he had feared, but the message underlying the opening chapter is ...”

“... for the musicologist is to realise that the choice of studying other disciplines is governed not by his tastes and ideas alone, but by sheer necessity. Further, he must not only absorb the content of other disciplines, but – and this is much more difficult – put each to constructive use in his own field.’ Lang ...”

“... between actions and their social meaning. Pat Rogers’s approach to 18th-century literature is by way of popular culture. He agrees with other scholars that Augustan satire gets much of its vitality from its relation to Lucian and Juvenal, Rabelais and Erasmus, Scarron and Cervantes, but he emphasises its nearer relation to ‘the actualities of ...”

“... of my life. It was like the death of an estranged father. In those early days, he liked to travel by train. At Oxford, he had written a prize-winning essay on some aspect of the Victorian railway system. Since then the service had deteriorated. On one occasion not long after he had become Prime Minister, he was travelling on a Sunday to Blackpool with the ...”

“... is going to try him, nobody is going to bump him off. The worst that can happen now is abuse by newspapers, and that will only hasten the process of reconciliation with his friends. Newspapers are ‘they’ and we, after all, are ‘we’. As Andrew Boyle relates, it turned out that a great many old acquaintances of Burgess and Maclean were much more ...”

“... The Second World War is no longer what it used to be. The populists of the New Right, aided and abetted by amateur historians of the mole-hunting variety, have been distorting it into a morality tale of the Cold War. Scholars may talk as they please, constructing complex patterns of interpretation for a minority audience: the popular ground has been won by the Chapman Pincher school of history, with its attendant band of novelists, journalists and politicians ...”

“... their ordinary life becomes illumined with the significance of destiny, as the ‘great man’-to-be fuses momentarily with the child. These moments, for Sartre, bestow a vertiginous god-like sensation upon the reader, who is thereby placed in a position to exchange knowing looks and indulgent smiles with the author over the heads of the characters. Patricia ...”

“... against the nuclear arms race has also received considerable inspiration from a series of articles by Jonathan Schell which appeared this past February in the New Yorker. These articles have now been reprinted in book form, and are continuing to have a profound impact on people’s thinking about the nuclear threat. The book is divided into three sections. The ...”

“... of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets. So what is oddest about ...”

“... a Pre-Raphaelite picture when you see one, but definitions come hard. The paintings are likely to be detailed, but Rossetti’s are soft and generalised; they often take subjects from English poetry or the Bible, but can be pure landscapes, or illustrations of Greek myths, or even about modern politics. The Pre-Raphaelite ...”

“... study, though it offers simply to tell ‘a story about a story’. The Roman Lucretia was raped by Tarquin, the king’s son, or rather blackmailed into submission by Tarquin’s threat of killing her and his slave and leaving them in bed together. The following morning she called in her father and husband, told them what ...”

“... accord. And how many must have wished that they could, with equal ease, cause him to vanish by the magic words: la séance est suspendue. Within hours, British journalists were back in the business of hopeful speculation that Paisley might, by this renewed proof of his crass disregard for correct behaviour, have ...”

“... that the most seasoned critic will never possess. The history of art as an academic discipline is by and large aligned with this hierarchy of value. Accounting for the existence of objects consumes the time of most people in the profession: documenting the facts of patronage, original locations and arrangements, details of technique, iconographic ...”