“... will probably do the same, but its deeds are unlikely to match its words. As a backbencher, Michael Heseltine was groping for a German-style developmental corporatism. Ministers like Chris Patten and Malcolm Rifkind were visibly at odds with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown ...”

“... Hawthorne. No circle in the South could match that intellectual array. Nevertheless, along with Michael O’Brien, Genovese has successfully revived interest in Southern antebellum thinkers whose obscurity, they claim, is unmerited. The Southern Tradition reaffirms his long-standing devotion to the pro-slavery thinkers but takes still greater delight in ...”

“... happy warrior of Volume One. To mark the difference of tone, or perhaps out of mere incompetence, Michael Joseph have arranged matters so that the two volumes don’t match, whether in dust jackets or out of them: clashing cloths, misaligned lettering, ill-assorted portraits. Only face up and side by side do they make a pair, as though the publisher ...”

“... Dr Bennett’s essay was not merely a manifesto for Church conservatives: it also amounted to a straight allegation of a liberal conspiracy – a conspiracy, moreover, touching directly on the responsibilities of one of the commissioning editors (Mr Derek Pattinson). For the central point of Dr Bennett’s argument – predictably almost totally disregarded ...”

“... and writes villanelles, triolets and ballades: this may be in part a defensive strategy, as her ‘straight’ poems, including the sadly inevitable lines on an old photograph, are much less capable, and can be merely sentimental. Duncan Forbes also has some light and comical poems, ‘Fatso and Spotty’ and ‘Politics of Envy’ (about the ‘Jackdaw folder ...”

“... I think we thought of him as ‘our boy’. We bossed him. Occasionally, when he didn’t walk straight or carry our bags or speak when we wanted him to, we’d slap him or hit his hands with a ruler. We had to pass through fields to get to school, with diggers going and ‘workies’ taking little notice of us, though from time to time they’d bring over ...”

“... which is precluded by the structure of a whole situation has lost its grip on history. Michael Burleigh is surely on firm ground, however, in wondering whether Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union – a nightmare possibility of a Nazi-dominated Europe, but not one, as he shows, that can be dismissed as fantasy. Jonathan Haslam, arguing about ...”

“... know his party better’. Other senior Tories whom she also despised, including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, were summoned back into the fold as cover for her inability to devise a winning Brexit strategy. But Osborne, never. He didn’t stand in the 2017 general election. The dilemma May faced was how to square the circle Brexit had conjured up: on the ...”

“... any description of his extra-marital relationships, but he clearly wanted to set the record straight in some way so he drafted an extended account of them with instructions that it was only to be published after his death. (His son seems, perhaps prudently, to have decided that it should come out only after the death in 1983 of his father’s most ...”

“... When Will tries to explain that global warming is shaped like an upward curve, rather than a straight line, and that there’s no stopping it when it starts, she replies that it ‘sounds like a credit card’. Neither Heather nor the Sikh is particularly interesting; as Canaan’s Tongue suggested and Lowboy now proves, Wray has no gift for creating ...”

“... efforts to tackle climate change over the course of the first decade of the 21st century. Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious ...”

“... than boats borne back into the past. Goldsmith himself claims his books are ‘impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.’ He may or may not be pulling our leg. Such writing – so transparent (‘Watch for lanes being closed between exits 9 and ...”

“... make it tremendously intriguing. This new edition, introduced and heavily annotated by Michael Franklin, should be welcomed by both literary scholars and historians. A 1908 reprinting gave Hartly House the very apt subtitle ‘A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings’. When the book originally appeared in 1789, Hastings’s defence team was busily ...”

“... It is Sandra Fredman, among all the essayists in this book, who at least gets the questions straight; and it is not a coincidence that she starts an incisive essay on labour law and human rights by asking whether we ought not to be sceptical about scepticism. If there is a single area in which there is good historical reason not to trust the judges, it ...”

“... which challenges the assumption, shared by Greenberg, Clark, and Greenberg’s one-time protégé Michael Fried, that modern art is valuable as a defence and expression of the imagination; and Caroline Jones’s Eyesight Alone, in which she reads Greenberg against himself to show that his idea of a purely visual art hooks into modernity’s increasingly ...”