“... of ring-tailed roarers, pork barrel philosophers, stand-up comedy of a high order, wit and a broad vein of redneck shrewdness. It can be very entertaining. As much fun as drinking, as they like to say, but without the hangover and all for a dollar. Matthew J. Raphael (a coy pseudonym used to protect his alcoholic’s anonymity) investigates the life and ...”

“... nominally under Sir Gilbert, but more delicate and more respectful of post-medieval fabric. William Morris’s firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings ...”

“... 1939. Whether Cameron holds to this notion of history, or whether it is rather a preoccupation of William Hague’s, is a matter of speculation. It was Cameron who negotiated the party’s departure from the quasi-Christian Democratic bloc in the European Parliament into the reactionary rag-bag where the Tory MEPs now nestle. (Though to judge by the opinions ...”

“... example of how ‘microhistory’, based on a deep immersion in local sources, can illuminate broad historical patterns. It also suggests some of the limitations of this increasingly popular genre of historical analysis.A Mind to Stay spans nearly two centuries of history. The first part, which begins in the antebellum period, focuses on the experiences ...”

“... highest benches of the Legislative Assembly. Neither the provincial geography of the book, nor its broad conclusions, would have displeased Georges Lefebvre, the interwar pioneer of history from below. What is lost in terms of the familiar drama of the revolution is gained in the portrayal of innumerable ordinary citizens who were obliged to pick sides and ...”

“... portrait in Charles I: King and Collector, the Royal Academy’s current exhibition, you meet a broad canvas painted four years later. This tumultuous pictorial poem was delivered by Anthony Van Dyck within a few months of his arrival in London from Antwerp in 1632, and its theme is royal romance. It shows Charles and Henrietta Maria half-length, their ...”

“... known as the Beveridge Report, an unlikely bestseller when it was published in November 1942. William Beveridge was and is much misunderstood. He was a lifelong liberal, briefly a Liberal MP, who detested the expression ‘welfare state’ and was dismayed by the Attlee government’s subsequent creation of such a state on managerial-centralist ...”

“... 188 returned home with him.The smallest of the warships accompanying Anson had been HMS Wager, a broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran ...”

“... he draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of ...”

“... modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang’s lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary’s argument that China had a ‘liberal tradition’ of constitutional thought. The legal theorist Xu Zhangrun, who was dismissed from Tsinghua University in July last year for his criticisms of Xi Jinping’s regime, invokes this ...”

“... it’s The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my ...”

“... was still unnerving to have one’s private life put on display. A year earlier Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had published Journey to the Frontier, a joint Life of Julian Bell and John Cornford, who died in Spain a few months before Bell. It is the product of a more decorous school of biography: they didn’t seek out information that people weren’t ...”

“... At that time, in other words, and alongside neo-con celebrities such as Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, Fukuyama was beating the drum for a ‘shift in focus from al-Qaida to Iraq’. He now expresses qualms about the killing of ‘tens of thousands’ of innocent Iraqis who had done nothing to harm America or its inhabitants: ‘These casualties ...”

“... worried yet – Mitchell often took his sweet time writing a piece, and the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, was never one to press a question, or even ask one in a voice above a whisper. Mitchell thought of his dream as marking the exact day ‘I began living in the past,’ but that, it could be argued, was a natural step for a man writing a book about ...”

“... to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some Victorian ...”