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“... of old streets to make way for its City and Southwark approaches. A view from the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields (1827) showing the shored-up backs of houses on the south side of Duke’s Court strikingly anticipates the look of a semi-blitzed London terrace in 1945. But it is, in Peter Jackson’s words, ‘the ordinary people of London going about ...”

“... found the only extant item of his personal correspondence, a letter to him from his neighbour Richard Quiney; Malone who found what remains the only known copy of the 1594 first quarto of Venus and Adonis (and later bequeathed it, along with most of his remarkable library, to the Bodleian); Malone whose path-breaking edition of 1790, with its insistence ...”

“... and domesticated, nostalgic, cute; war seen from René’s deplorable café, not from Auschwitz. Martin Gilbert has built his own monument to the sufferers to mark the occasion. His history reminds us that the war has still spilt more blood than ink. The book is a bleak, desolate evocation of the horrors of war, a modern Waste Land, an unremitting catalogue ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... a brief, profound and very welcome social revolution’. The French professor Marie Alexandrine Martin writes in her full-scale history of modern Cambodia that, on the contrary, the peace mission favoured ‘Phnom Penh’s profiteers, the Khmer Rouge utopists, the Chinese businessmen of South-East Asia, the annexationist neighbours’. She believes that ...”

“... bequeathed to the former American colonies. It can also be argued, as it was by Adolf Loos and Richard Neutra, that advanced American building technology was the mainspring of all real Modernism. But if iron and steel construction, lifts and skyscrapers, all stemmed from Yankee ingenuity, it took European Bauhaus radicalism to convert them into the bald ...”

“... to place some higher example before the world. Carp would have been appalled by the goings-on in Martin Amis’s Dead Babies – all kinds of sex, all kinds of drugs, all kinds of violence, if little or no arson – which was written a mere fifty years later, and has just been adapted for the cinematograph and directed by William Marsh. It’s due for ...”

“... a writer like Ernst Jünger, who never was a Nazi? Come to think of it, why is he so obsessed by Martin Niemöller, who was not only not in the Freikorps but was also a leading figure in the German resistance – a fact to which Theweleit alludes at the beginning, but never satisfactorily explains? The extent to which one can assume the Freikorps to have ...”

“... present the geographer as the student of landscape, as the environmentalist and as the ideologist. Richard Muir looks at the landscape as nature’s stage. Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley, with their team of scientists, identify the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of ...”

“... there is no debate and no vote. This leads to administrative absurdities of the kind revealed in Richard Crossman’s diary entry for 20 September 1966, when he was Lord President: ‘The Privy Council is the best example of pure mumbo-jumbo you can find. It is interesting to reflect that four ministers, busy men, all had to take a night and a day off to go ...”

“... and France in the medieval and early modern periods. Among Febvre’s books were a biography of Martin Luther and a book about the Rhine. The first issue of Annales included studies of the price of papyrus in Ancient Greece, German industry in the First World War, the population problem in the Soviet Union, and the theories of Max Weber. Articles and ...”

“... often telling. Robert Altman’s A Wedding is ‘a stony gaze at a pack of unattractive people’. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver ‘is not a documentary of the squalor of New York City but the documentation of a squalid mind driven mad by what it perceives’. ‘By 1976 the simulation of violence had reached a level of mindlessness and predictability that ...”

“... If anyone living in London around 1800 did not know Martin van Butchell by sight, Butchell himself was not to blame, for he used the most elaborate means to make himself conspicuous. At a time when almost no one but Jews wore beards, Butchell wore a long one – ‘full eight inches long’ – and insisted that women thought clean-shaven men were ‘incomplete ...”

“... types of Englishmen and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois ...”

“... instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed ...”