“... series of mergers which transformed the firm, the Routledge and Kegan Paul archive, dating back to George Routledge’s ‘railway library’ in the mid-19th century and coming forward to Wittgenstein, was deposited, on ‘permanent loan’, at nearby UCL. The Penguin and Hamish Hamilton archives are, substantially, on loan at Bristol University library, in ...”

“... stood on the site of the vegetable garden (or orto) of an eighth-century monastery dedicated to St Michael, so it was nicknamed Or-san-michele. In the centuries since, it has been transformed from market to church to museum. Its latest incarnation, the newly restored Museo Orsanmichele, considers the artistic and architectural innovations of each successive ...”

“... Soon after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to parochial schools, where he thrived ...”

“... architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly ...”

“... boots, they led one of the first 1970s revivals in the 1980s: pop veterans such as ABC and Boy George soon borrowed from their palette and repertoire. Taboo, however, was about more than style: the club was part of Bowery’s larger ambition to provoke. To Dada, Warhol’s Factory and the films of Waters, we might add to the list of Bowery’s influences ...”

“... an account of de Clérambault’s most famous instance, a French woman who was convinced that King George V was in love with her and believed, among other things, that a slight twitch of the curtains at Buckingham Palace was a signal to her. Enduring Love has a case-study of Jed in an appendix, complete with professional jargon and not entirely fake ...”

“... quarto, with the additional teasing possibility of its having been co-written with the unsavoury George Wilkins (suspected brothel-keeper, convicted perpetrator of various acts of violence against women, and playwright). Lytton Strachey, it’s true, wasn’t keen. In ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’ (published in Books and Characters, 1922) he wrote that ...”

“... of partition, in the mind and in the historical world. Rose stresses the reservations inhabiting George Eliot’s version of Zionism – ‘An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation … if not in actual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be ...”

“... was part of Empson’s long quarrel with Rosemond Tuve about the liturgical (or not) background to George Herbert’s poem ‘The Sacrifice’. Empson is refuting what he takes to be Tuve’s assertion that he, Empson, ‘can taste a poem better with no knowledge’. He says he has all kinds of knowledge.I claim to know not only the traditional background of ...”

“... in practice, and in any case an immense task of sorting, translating, and analysing lies ahead. Michael Howard, for instance, in a characteristically crisp introduction to The Quest for Stability, asks the basic question whether at the end of the Second World War Stalin actually aspired to global hegemony. This, he says, ‘we shall be able to tell only ...”

“... that his worries sprang from the epilepsy from which his father, his Uncle Charles, and his cousin George all suffered, and to which two or more of his brothers may have been prey. If the records have disappeared, nothing can be medically ‘clear’. And the ‘may have been prey’ is a typically feeble clincher. Martin would have us believe that when ...”

“... On 10 September 1949 Michael Perrin, one of the heads of the British Atomic Energy Programme, was woken up by an urgent telephone call asking him to come to the communications room at the US Embassy in London. There his opposite number in the Pentagon asked that an RAF plane be sent to the upper atmosphere to check radioactivity detected by the US Air Force that appeared to signal a Soviet atomic explosion ...”

“... Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill during the nine days he spent on the island, eating little and urinating, defecating and vomiting on himself. He died of sepsis, after staff failed to take him to any of his nine scheduled medical appointments. Emanuel ...”

“... of Aphra Behn, Defoe, Fielding or Smollett, while Dickens ignored the subject of sex altogether. Michael Mason’s main problem is to determine how prudery affected behaviour. Was it merely a veneer of hypocrisy, covering up a very different sexual reality? Were there fewer, and less enjoyable, sexual acts inside and outside marriage? Wild figures once ...”

“... Michael Burn assumes in this book that the name of Richard Hillary means nothing to present-day readers, so the reviewer had better follow his practice and provide biographical details. Although he was born in Australia shortly after the end of the First World War, Hillary came to England at an early age and had a thoroughly English upper middle-class education – prep school, followed by public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (Trinity College ...”