“... not least on the Barclays’ home turf of West London, where the slumlord turned property mogul Peter Rachman was making his fortune. The brothers set up an estate agency in Notting Hill. One day a woman came in looking to move to a particular street in the neighbourhood so that she could be near her elderly father. Frederick showed her a small house on the ...”

“... image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman, a right-wing Australian ...”

“... a vivid makeover of a 14th-century acquaintance of Chaucer. I learned about the first from a New York Times review of Hermione Lee’s 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf. In the midst of Daphne Merkin’s somewhat dutiful praise there erupts a moment of real excitement: Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf, by Panthea Reid, while not nearly as strong as ...”

“... the Mayflower, is firmly religious (announced by endorsements on the cover from the archbishop of York and the born-again Christian MP Tim Farron); his PhD, the thesis of which informs his book, was in church history. His subtitle claims that puritans invented freedom, which might seem extravagant to anyone who associates puritanism with its negation.Puritans ...”

“... his correspondence with Simon and Schuster. Thelma Toole thereafter always maintained that the New York publishers (more particularly, that ‘Jewish creature’, Gottlieb) had effectively murdered her son by first raising then dashing his hopes. More than one commentator has hinted that John’s relationship with his overwhelming mother may have had something ...”

“... with plans, some fulfilled and some not, for free clinics in Zagreb, Moscow, Frankfurt, New York, Trieste and Paris.’ But were these clinics as successful as Danto suggests? They were certainly besieged by patients: ‘Our work,’ Eitingon wrote to Freud in 1923, ‘needs more and more space.’ (Finding space was difficult because of the postwar ...”

“... study of the French Resistance. It also prepares the reader for the full transcription of Peter the Great’s Testament as an appendix to the novel, and warns us that we have narrowly avoided getting the Protocols of Zion’ into the bargain. What is the function of this mythic sounding-board to contemporary history? In a sense, the answer could be ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... era of Colin Davis (1971-86). Things, indeed, began to fall apart when Davis’s partnerships with Peter Hall and Götz Friedrich broke down. Tooley dutifully chronicles the years from 1947 to 1988, but only comes alive in his final 80 pages, with a disgruntled assessment of his successor. Isaacs for his part is critical, if not harshly so, of Tooley. He ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... meta-analyses, so that clinical interventions and policy decisions could be based on the evidence. Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish endocrinologist who had studied bias in trials of anti-arthritic drugs, was an early recruit, and left clinical practice to set up the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen. In 1999, five weeks before the Danish government was expected to ...”

“... How to Be an Alien. He left Budapest in the 1920s to write for the Hungarian-American press in New York and has had his own psychological theories about poltergeists since interviewing his countryman, Sándor Ferenczi, a psychoanalyst and one of Freud’s original inner circle. He has a hunch that supernormal phenomena may come from within rather than from ...”

“... neuritis in her left arm from too much surfing. They rejoined the party in Canada, sailed from New York and arrived in Southampton in December. They moved to Sunningdale in Berkshire, where they rented a flat, and then bought a house, ‘a sort of millionaire-style Savoy suite transferred to the country’. Archie insisted on calling it ‘Styles’. His ...”

“... side from Smyth. Yet it is impossible to resist his earlier thesis – set out in Scandinavian York and Dublin and Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles – that modern historians up to and including Stenton have been much too ready to accept that the West Saxon unification and re-Christianisation of England in the tenth century was ...”