“... a sort of glorified guide to the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great Exhibition of ...”

“... Making simplifying assumptions of the kind common in economics, Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton devised an elegant way of doing just that. Their mathematical model of options prices was quickly picked up by options traders, who started to use it in Chicago’s crowded trading pits. In so doing, they changed patterns of options prices (which ...”

“... then shadow chancellor, and he wanted to be Britain’s first Asian prime minister. Amin, who may not have been so high up the kill list, was interviewed by Good Morning Britain shortly after going to Syria, and told the interviewer that leaving Gatwick had been ‘one of the happiest moments in my life’. Both young men had appeared from Syria in an ...”

“... decapitate her; for others, the amputation of fingers or toes would do. Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented, first published in 1896 and now reissued by Hesperus Press (£9.99), is a catalogue of those unfortunates who didn’t plan so well ahead. ‘The thought of suffocation in a coffin is more terrible than that of torture on the rack, or burning at ...”

“... to her tomorrows,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, the last person to see her alive. But now we may be in a position to say that Marilyn Monroe’s tomorrows have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie star; that’s more books than ...”

“... proclaim ‘Power to the people’ in making usage the only criterion of whether something may be said, there is then for them an immediate opening-up of rich new possibilities of authority and authoritarianism. For who is to tell the people how the people are (is?) using their (its?) immense language except the indispensable new class of panoptic ...”

“... pair of hands. Nichols begins with a story that pretty much says it all. On 7 February 2001, Robert Pickett fired several rounds from a handgun through the fence surrounding the White House.Unaware of whether or not a terrorist incident was playing out, secret service agents rushed to the sides of the vice-president and president. They found Cheney ...”

“... Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile ...”

“... the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of syphilis – had been spending his time compiling an alphabetical list of cities. Nearly a year later, Brahms found Schumann doing almost the same thing: ‘I looked again at his ...”

“... a not-too-oblique attack on Irish neutrality in the course of a visit to Northern Ireland on 4 May, he was – presumably – unaware of the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his ...”

“... On Aggression. Then came The Naked Ape (Desmond Morris) and The Territorial Imperative (Robert Ardrey), which made the idea of aggression in defence of territory a household phrase as the name of an instinct which men, like other mammals, are presumed to possess, and which promised to explain their warlike behaviour and regional hatreds.* Moral ...”

“... fans were once legion, and as reverential as mystics or poets. Indeed many were poets, like Robert Bridges, who sang that she had ‘all passion’s splendour’. Writers of all sorts revered her, from the anonymous Late Victorian critic who enthused over the structure of Wuthering Heights to the novelist L.P. Hartley, who doted on her whole oeuvre and ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished. As the first major biography since Hallam Tennyson’s pious memoir of 1897, it has obvious importance ...”

“... rewards and punishments, the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, to be effective. ‘Virtue may owe her panegyrics to morality, but must derive her authority from religion.’ This analysis is a particular application of a more general principle. Johnson believed that all human effort springs from the elementary passions of avoiding pain and seeking ...”

“... toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavour a fictional method.’ Lane is thinking of American cinema as Hollywood. But there is a strong tradition of American documentary, from ...”