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“... The Auk, however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli Barnett, who, in The Desert Generals (1960), went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of ...”

“... software that would enable them to dodge the Great Firewall of China – which blocks almost all major Western news sites and social media outlets – and browse the internet without restrictions. There was some surprise when it turned out that even elite students in China had little interest in finding out what Westerners were thinking. Only 53 per cent of ...”

“... affairs under Donald Trump. The general direction was set in March 2024 by the defence secretary, John Healey, who said Labour’s aim was to restore the British armed forces to their standing before 2010, when they were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the outset the SDR was the object of a proxy battle between the armed forces and the ...”

“... Although Surrey’s surviving poems can be read in an afternoon, they represent a major achievement for someone whose life was cut short (literally: he was beheaded) at the age of 30. He invented blank verse, as well as the ‘Shakespearean’ form of the sonnet. His poems habitually dwell on isolation: they adopt the voices of Petrarchan lovers brooding on an inner hurt, prisoners lamenting past happiness, or psalmists threatening destruction to their enemies ...”

“... Rubio, another member of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ...”

“... bought off and agitators had difficulty rallying a following, but in the case of each one of five major drainage projects a complete cross-section of the community affected seems to have been mobilised. Sympathy for this opposition extended to local office-holders, resulting in the heavy-handed intervention of the central government. Moreover, resistance to ...”

“... their day. In many respects it wasn’t. The mindless trench warfare during the committee stage of major bills in which the opposition attempted to keep the government up all night is now a thing of the past, thanks in large part to an initiative taken by Tony Blair when he was Labour’s energy spokesman. Faced with a government bill to privatise the ...”

“... the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George Washington; political histories of the Stamp Act crisis and the causes of the American Revolution; social histories of family life in colonial New England and Virginia; intellectual histories of Puritan ...”

“... Gear, were the only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the ...”

“... century who (quite wrongly, I think) has been declared the least élitist: Then Hardy, for many a major Poet, is for me just an old stager, Shuffling about a bogus heath, Cob-webbed with his Victorian breath. The lines will provoke more indulgent chuckles now than in 1970, when Thomas published them. For inside twenty years, with astonishing velocity, Hardy ...”

“... as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to see President Hayes unveil a statue of Halleck in the so-called ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...”

“... the real-life Rochester, Alexander Larman provides a workmanlike account of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at the battle of Worcester. The two men escaped together to Paris, where ...”

“... since Eliot and the leading poets (now dead) of my own Thirties generation, there have been no major poets, no “good” poets at all; and perhaps only six middling poets worth attending to – six poets in England (and as far as long or short sight tells me, fewer still in the United States).’ That every year new maggots make new flies is what ...”

“... who, over the years, have been enlightened enough to publish and keep in print the works of many major and minor modern poets (for which they should be saluted). The cost of permissions which this firm levies is so high as to make low-sale critical monographs unviable: indeed, as far as one can make out, Faber do not recognise fair dealing as applicable to ...”