“... such an on-off affair, so fractious, elusive, splattered with froideurs and reconciliations. Jonathan Parry, a specialist in the 19th century, finds that his fellow historians have taken astonishingly little interest in British tangles in the Middle East in the first half of that century, though the relationship was then at its most intense. In ...”

“... as well as to the large reserves of strength in the British constitution (the contention of Jonathan Parry in the LRB of 18 April). Of course, the UK – the English and Welsh parts of it anyway – is the only country that has voted to leave the EU. It’s also the only country to have been offered the choice. If we accept that this latter fact ...”

“... would engage in a ‘long-running and increasingly public slanging-match’, which, as Jonathan Parry notes in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy, ‘both men found immensely life-enhancing’. If Cowling was not taken altogether seriously in the higher reaches of the Conservative Party, he was nevertheless influential ...”

“... on claims that a concern to maintain racial purity increasingly trumped other social ambitions; Jonathan Parry offers a careful account of the decline of institutional reform. All these historians are reliable, sober and meticulous. But they appear to have forgotten that we need strong arguments, even wrong arguments: the job of the historian is to ...”

“... have found it increasingly hard to express themselves. Heinrich Hoffer and Corporal Neal Parry in The Rules of Perspective are typical Thorpe characters. By the end of the Second World War, Hoffer has outlived enough of his colleagues to be appointed Acting Acting Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Lohenfelde, a fictional Westphalian ...”

“... better things to do with our hands than walk on them. You and I are the eastern ground apes of Jonathan Kingdon’s Lowly Origin: suggested occupants of one of the last great blank spaces on the map of human evolution. Kingdon is a defiant eccentric in the world of anthropology. He is a wonderful artist: his illustrations in the Atlas of Evolution in ...”

“... at the wrong time in the wrong place,’ Ken Worpole, of the Clissold Users Group, told the critic Jonathan Glancey. The architects were based in Manchester. It was a pattern repeated so many times, through Hackney education and social services: the appointment of high-salaried advisers from elsewhere, shadowy corporate multi-taskers on maxi salaries. There ...”

“... will, 1605 – but he may just be the Thomas Marloe who travelled to America in the ship Jonathan, and who was living in 1624 at a settlement near Jamestown, Virginia, breathing the freer air of America that would so much have suited brother Kit. Urry’s coverage of Marlowe’s later career is sketchier, but one body of interesting new material ...”

“... Shall​  we never again talk together in laconic?’ Joseph Addison once wrote to Jonathan Swift, by way of inviting him to dinner the next time he happened to be in London. It’s the kind of invitation that might well appeal to Helen DeWitt, an ardent admirer of 18th-century wits and philosophers, and a classicist whose erudition undoubtedly extends to a familiarity with the defining features of Spartan rhetoric (Laconia is the region of the south-eastern Peloponnese which includes the city of Sparta ...”

“... gunslingers eager to blow walruses away at point-blank range. Gift-reassignment firms allow you to parry Yuletide atrocity knitwear targeted at you by well-meaning relatives and palm it off on some other luckless recipient – which, as Sandel notes, raises the prospect of Argyle socks ping-ponging their way across cyberspace for ever. It has long been ...”