“... again in that war, leading motorised troops from his private Rolls-Royce against the Senussi, North African Muslims who sided with Germany and undertook to invade Egypt. Churchill said later that Bend’Or would have been awarded the Victoria Cross if he hadn’t been a duke. His life in the Twenties and Thirties was scarcely quieter. Grosvenor House was ...”

“... indelibly marked as it is by its historical and intellectual origins in the period of European and North American bourgeois hegemony which endured from the 17th century almost to the present day, can scarcely do justice to the diversity of institutional and cultural forms we see around us now, when the axis of global economic power is tilting away from the ...”

“... he a harsh landlord – a charge laid at times of Socialist agitation among the peasants of the North Italian plain? Another reason is that Verdi covered his tracks. His emotional life remains hedged off by his formidable reserve. Why did he live out of wedlock with Giuseppina Strepponi for so long at a time when to do so meant awkwardness and ...”

“... reached Europe from Africa in the Seventies and passed either from there or via the West Indies to North America. (Europe, by this account, is experiencing two waves of the epidemic simultaneously: an initial, statistically less significant one from Africa dating back to the Seventies and a second one brought over from America by gay men in the ...”

“... region disappearing offshore in the second half of the 1990s. The situation in the Middle East and North Africa is even worse, which helps to explain the chronic unemployment and social tension throughout the region. Earlier this year, Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa proposed an additional $25 billion in aid to Africa by 2010, a sum dwarfed by the amounts ...”

“... Revel in Warwickshire, but the Morte Darthur was written by Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers in the North Riding, not a thief, not a rapist, but the soldier sent to besiege Alnwick and Bamborough in 1462, and the man excluded from pardon six years later for supporting his near-neighbour, Sir Humphrey Neville, in Lancastrian rebellion. Matthew’s view has been ...”

“... lent by a retired black sailor) and naval costume – and Douglass took a series of trains north. On 4 September 1838 he arrived in New York: ‘I was a FREEMAN, and the voice of peace and joy thrilled my heart!’Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line meant freedom from bondage, symbolised by Douglass’s decision to drop his given surname, Bailey, in favour ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... how Old Testament language about the various ‘covenants’ between God and man contributed to North American exceptionalism. He will have to work hard to understand how Lutherans differed from other Protestants in their understanding of what happens in the Eucharist, and how both Lutherans and those other more advanced Protestants (the ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... Only Ireland gets a decent showing over the centuries – here, perhaps, the interests of the North American diaspora can be detected – and it is revealed for what it was: the model colony on whose pattern the entire Empire was based. India, too, is well catered for, but other parts of the Empire are treated more cavalierly. There is nothing about the ...”

“... 1000 kg bombs. ‘The blast from an 800 lb bomb,’ he wrote after studying damage at Tripoli in North Africa, ‘will frequently not even kill a fully-exposed rabbit at 100 ft. It certainly would not kill men at this distance.’ A scientist was on the way to establishing something the military had not considered: that there were limits to the effectiveness ...”

“... of Burmeister and Wain and the Motor Ship returned to mind when, researching the history of North Sea oil, I spent much of my time, troglodytic, in the cellar of the university library in Tübingen, working my way through back numbers of the Economist and the Financial Times, and various hefty monographs – usually in German – on offshore ...”

“... A relief, then, to turn from all this deranged big-talk to some sturdy English self-effacement. John Haffenden is steadily becoming the closest we have to a domestic version of the Mansos and Grobels. He has already published a book of earnest conversations with a dozen or so poets and this month he gives it a companion: Novelists in Interview.2 Plodding ...”