“... But if the obsequies are awkward, ‘a good death’ in the 17th-century sense, like John Evelyn’s touching description at his mother’s bedside in 1635 – now that is really difficult. One name is common to Rosemary Dinnage’s thanatological anthology of personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph ...”

“... of with the increasingly tatty heritage park of Fortress Britain. A new book by Richard Mayne and John Pinder shows that the history of the federal idea remains instructive.* For when the Schuman Plan turned Monnet’s ideas about European federation into a proposal for a coal and steel community, Britain kept out of it. When the European Defence Community ...”

“... posted outside Oldfield’s London flat. Waiters who took him meals there were photographed. Sir John Junor, then a columnist for the Sunday Express, now boasts that he was told by Sir David McNee, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, that Oldfield was a homosexual. Junor passed this on to the Prime Minister in a private letter. Eventually, someone ...”

“... so is familiar with the ‘Blue Hotel’, the police headquarters in Johannesburg otherwise called John Vorster Square. And then a black man fell out of the sky. He came flying through a fifth floor window, landed at our feet in a spray of glass, and lay there like an upturned tortoise, feebly waving his arms in the air. I ran over and knelt beside him, but I ...”

“... him to be disturbed by conflicting allegiances in a way which is not foreign to readers of, say, John le Carré’s stories. Picking up such parallels is one pleasure. A deeper reason for the effectiveness of the books is the escape they offer from present anxiety into past discomfort. When Aubrey sets sail for the East Indies with the British envoy, Edward ...”

“... of ‘the texture of testimony’, the ‘intimation of character’. He also, however, quotes John Bayley’s view, similar to the one expressed here, that these ‘losses’ are really gains, that the serial makes concise and clear much in the novels that is otiose and woolly. The book is a very useful addition to the biography in showing the ...”

“... Council of Churches, intelligence and counter-intelligence, and such German experts in Britain as John Wheeler Bennett. But it is questionable whether this tissue of unsubstantiated promises – comprised as it was of many, often contradictory, fugitive contacts, indirect reports and indiscreet conversations – really amounts to a model of international ...”

“... schools public schools and Mehta tells us why – which seems a bit much in a book published by John Murray. Christopher Hill – he of the little-finger handshake – is asked to explain the attractions of Marxism in the light of the Hungarian Revolution. Lord Oxmanton’s mother is asked to explain the rules and rituals of pheasant-shoots. Useful stuff if ...”

“... allowed itself to be used to provide publicity for Sothebys, who staged a preview there of Elton John’s collection of bric-à-brac; for the Sock Shop and for Burberrys. ‘We,’ Lord Armstrong told the Lords in defence of these arrangements, ‘are the National Museum of contemporary design. We take pride in having artefacts of contemporary design in ...”

“... of food riots, particularly the well-documented one at Maldon in Essex in 1628, of which John Walter has written a fine account, would surely have cast doubt on this assumption, which in any case neglects the elements of ritual inversion which are so central both to the acceptance of female leadership and to the adoption of female disguises. There ...”

“... goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ‘post-modern ...”

“... as £168,000 from English copyrights. Another work that made a great deal of money in England was John Stainer’s The Crucifixion, first performed in 1887, and unmentioned by Pahlen. Called into question time and time again both for its ‘inane’ libretto and its patchy music, it was nonetheless described by one contemporary reviewer as ...”

“... doomed in the long run if the link between the two should turn out, after all, to be intrinsic. John Searle has recently been dining out on this line of thought. That, then, is the background for the most interesting of McGinn’s papers, which are, fortunately, also the ones that philosophy buffs will find most accessible. As I read him, McGinn has four ...”

“... letters to civil servants, scholars and friends (among them Henry Cole, Edward Fitzgerald and John Forster) demanding access to documents or help with maps for his work on Cromwell. He expected help as his right, and he got it. But he never merged into metropolitan literary and social circles. As Anne Procter noted, in a letter helpfully quoted by the ...”

“... the correct, impartial course between unpalatable extremes. Amnesty International’s US director, John Healey, even suggested that those critics doubting the incubator story were in effect denying all Iraqi human rights abuses as disclosed by Amnesty. In fact, there was only one critic – me – and I emphasised that most of Amnesty’s other charges had ...”