“... of the Union but not neglecting the rest, and focusing mainly on politics. The great strengths of Geoffrey Hosking’s The First Socialist Society are cultural history and a feel for the texture of life; Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Soviet Experiment, which also came out last year, is best at social history, the nationalities ...”

“... Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ... [than] the relics of the war that still ...”

“... after the Roman legions departed. At the other pole, six centuries later, stand the heroic liar Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae conjured up Arthurian splendour from scrappy British memories that they had had a champion against the Saxons, and some ingenious Welsh bishops who, furious at the unholy alliance of Anglo-Saxon and Norman ...”

“... were not helped by other doctors’ criticism of radical interventions. In the 1920s the surgeon Geoffrey Keynes (brother of Maynard) had argued that the results of radical surgery were often no better than those of more conservative procedures, and that Halsted’s centrifugal model should be reconsidered. American physicians didn’t pay much attention to ...”

“... so that men fight about women, and women elude, defy and complicate this fighting to the best of their abilities.’ In particular, mothers set their sons against their fathers. They warned that the old men were prepared to sell their own daughters in order to get co-wives for themselves. Deprived of their sisters’ bride-price, the sons would have ...”

“... most modern soldier of our time. The trap into which he fell is still set. This new biography by Geoffrey Perret, an Anglo-American soldier-turned-historian, is not the last word; but it is a big improvement on its forerunners, and Perret has dug up important new material. MacArthur was born in a dusty US Army post at Little Rock, Arkansas, on 26 January ...”

“... masterpiece out of its incongruous elements in a way that is wholly exemplary of the artist at his best. Palmer’s technique seems to have been unique, a striking combination of intricate pen-work and thick outline done in a gloopy mixture of ink and gum. (‘Outlines cannot be got too black,’ he jotted in his sketchbook in a characteristic spirit of ...”

“... the sovereign centres. Throughout the 1930s, Day-Lewis’s work attracted the usual venom from Geoffrey Grigson and the usual unsparing criticism from F.R. Leavis, but his consecration in the eyes of a wider public had come with T.E. Lawrence’s judgment in conversation with Winston Churchill, as reported in the Evening Standard in 1934, that Day-Lewis ...”

“... Of the essays collected and excellently translated in Dissemination, the best example of Derrida’s own practice of the deconstructive criticism he fathered is ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.* Here he pursues his question why the metaphysical tradition from Plato to the present subordinates writing to speech. Derrida is not claiming to reverse Plato and to subordinate speech acts to écriture, intentions to texts ...”

“... Gardens to some daring private high-rises, which were very unusual until the 21st century. The best development, as is so often the case, was the first, the Dulwich Wood Park Estate, with its small houses and eight-storey tower blocks, beautifully detailed with coloured panels, enormous windows and concrete pergolas. This was mildly experimental for ...”

“... not to swallow the illusion produced and to accept it as reality.What is certain is that his best stories, like all really good short stories, have an inner dimension of meaning more intangible and elemental than what they seem on the surface to be about. ‘At the End of the Passage’ has the presentation of a Poe-type melodrama, with all the ...”

“... and has drawn on the extraordinary learning he had earlier put to use in compiling the two best anthologies of the literature of the Spanish Civil War. Nothing Thirties is alien to him: hikers, newsreels, suburbs and revolutions find an equal welcome. The Twenties and Forties suffered agonies of envy when this book appeared. They relaxed when they ...”

“... writings (which are most compelling when closest to the music and making of poetry) that this poet best sets out his deeply held ideas of order.’ Crawford is undeniably deft in his treatment of the poetry; he makes the soundscape of poems like ‘Marina’ shimmer. But does this volume do enough to resolve the relations between ‘the music and making of ...”

“... superb bardic flourish that is both neoclassical, partly in a Swinburnian mode, and Whitmanesque: Best of all is my voice from the springing south: brilliant, particular leaves come rioting out of my mouth. It is the terrain of (on the safer side) Kathleen Raine and (on the dangerous edge) of Sylvia Plath. But to stay there too long risks stasis or ...”

“... technology, however, it can often make up by espionage. Even comparatively low-level spies like Geoffrey Prime in Britain and the Walker family in the United States are sometimes able to provide priceless technical intelligence. There is recent evidence that from 1976 to 1983 the KGB was able to read France’s diplomatic traffic with its Moscow embassy by ...”