“... pattern of vines and flowers had been covered up with plain wainscoting long before the Davenants took over the establishment). Honan has one or two soft spots of his own, however: when sifting through the hearsay which accumulated in the years after the playwright’s death he shows a clear preference for material which presents Shakespeare as a ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care ...”

“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British social-democratic tradition; still one in which the ...”

“... painter, came from Puerto Rico. After high school in Switzerland and New York City, Williams took a degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Hilda Doolittle (later H.D.) and Pound. In 1912, after a difficult two-year courtship, he married the shy and practical Florence (Flossie) Herman. During the same years he established a ...”

“... child’s development. To start with, you would notice the absence of a welcoming posture when you took your infant into your arms. Parents of such children in Baltimore were able to go to the new child psychiatry clinic. Kanner noted that the parents who came to see him were rather uptight professional people. Hence an inadvertent tragedy. He said the mothers ...”

“... Nazis, as was the case in most branches of the federal bureaucracy. Its first president, Otto John, had been active in the resistance, escaping to London after the failed putsch of 1944. In 1954 he popped up in East Berlin and revealed in a press conference that the soon-to-be West German Ministry of Defence and the foreign intelligence service that was ...”

“... pubs and offices. Their work, however, was low-paid and few were unionised. None of the women who took on casual cleaning jobs on the ships was ever offered a guaranteed minimum wage. Their work went unrecognised, for the most part, by male dockers, one of whom told an interviewer in 1985 that women ‘had absolutely nothing to do with dock ...”

“... off with: ‘And we are standing on a historical platform today, because on this very heath took place the great debates that made this country a democracy.’ There were two, three thousand people at that rally, and I think that was the first time I’d heard a political leader giving the audience a history lesson. In 1967 I went to North Vietnam for ...”

“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”

“... who had delighted him by reading the argument on the Protestant ethic as if it were a novel, took him to Bayreuth and elsewhere, and adored him for the rest of his life. Greatly taken among other things with the boots and gaiters he wore as a medical director in the reserve at the start of the war, she offered a sensuality that he would not otherwise ...”

“... Some 25 years after Alsace had been returned to France at the end of the Second World War, I took an opportunity to work there for a few months, in the belief that it would improve my French. A few bare facts about the contested history of the region had stayed with me from school history lessons, but they couldn’t have prepared me for what I walked into ...”

“... Archimedes’ death is the one fixed point in his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... about the screen-mediation of reality. In his philosophic commonplace book Straw Dogs (2002), John Gray propounded a new theory of consciousness: ‘In evolutionary prehistory consciousness emerged as a side-effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.’ Cronenberg is one of a burgeoning group of artists who are attempting to describe what ...”