“... towns in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Robertson devotes only a paragraph to it but as Roger Ekirch, a historian of the night, has observed, street lighting transformed the texture of urban life. It opened up the evening as a time for both labour and leisure, and provided a new and enduring metaphor. The coming of the light symbolised the escape ...”

“... and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid ...”

“... it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the ...”

“... a polemical framework which is all the more effective for being padded and partially covered. As William Gass pointed out in 1986 when this book was published to rapturous reviews in the United States, Home contains an assault on the ‘modern’ that conforms to type. It appeals to ‘us’, the long-suffering public, and it points the finger at ...”

“... Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent biographies, this ...”

“... out, claimed to be an exercise in what today is called judicial ‘originalism’. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s infamous pronouncement in Dred Scott that Black persons had ‘no rights which the white man is bound to respect’ purported to reflect the founders’ racial views at the time the Constitution was written.White Southerners’ efforts to ...”

“... nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially commissioned article by a professor of philosophy, Louis O. Mink, discusses Hexter’s theories of history – his most recent interest. Mink is polite but rather devastatingly unenthusiastic. His conclusion appears to be that what Hexter has said, in several volumes, is that good history is what good historians ...”

“... reign ended with his deposition less than a decade later, when a long-simmering conflict with Roger Mortimer spilled into open war. According to conventional accounts, he was captured by his enemies in the winter of 1326, shuffled around a bit while the nobility decided what to do with him, and then quietly murdered at Berkeley Castle in the late summer ...”

“... the Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its most ...”

“... scathing documentary of French complicity, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), or, in a different way, Louis Malle in his ambiguous portrait of a collaborator, Lacombe, Lucien (1974). If he was silent about what he had seen, he shared that silence with everyone who had lived through the war, whatever side they had been on. Melville himself made no secret of his ...”

“... and their fellow Caribbean poet René Depestre; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; the French poet Louis Aragon; the French photographer Robert Doisneau; the Russian-Mexican painter Vlady Rusakov and his father, Victor Serge, hero of the anti-Stalinist left. Several of her works are lost, including The Commune, Louise Michel and Us, a film she worked on in the ...”

“... that he had a long record of government service. During the civil war in Nicaragua, according to William Finnegan in a New Yorker profile, Reich headed a Contra-support programme that operated out of an outfit called the Office of Public Diplomacy. The office arranged speeches and recommended books to school libraries, but also leaked false stories to the ...”

“... never-to-be-completed biography of Madame de Maintenon, unofficial consort and second wife of Louis XIV. Another biographical project on Madame de Pompadour also went unfinished. Nancy Mitford and others who knew Murphy well considered her a modern incarnation of the salonnière – a woman whose witty talk, warmth of spirit and intellectual authority ...”

“... you remember any names?There would be some names that would not be recognised now; figures like Louis Golding who was popular in that day. I just picked them out of some magazine or book. So about half of this combative magazine, this Scorpion, was filled with these platitudes from London literary figures.Were you flattered?Oh, yes. They felt a social ...”