“... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...”

“... what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are ...”

“... stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her father, Lamar Smith, was a jeweller who was forever tinkering with watches. Her mother, Marguerite, a more vivacious personality, had intended to name her baby Enrico Caruso and bragged ...”

“... his apprenticeship without mishap in 1761. By 1767 he was in partnership with another bookseller, John Payne, in premises in Paternoster-row by St Paul’s Churchyard, ‘the centre of bookselling’, and he was to settle in the capital for the rest of his life. The profession of bookseller was at that time a capacious one. Johnson not only sold books but ...”

“... with an unimpaired confidence in the traditional weapons and ammunition. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, produced under the auspices of the Royal Economic Society, is among the glories of modern publishing. Printed at the Cambridge University Press, these handsome volumes maintain aesthetic standards in book production which are in themselves a ...”

“... in first class, and the hopes of the dispossessed in steerage. The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and ...”

“... details of Grieve’s early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could ...”

“... dealings with RKO, and he seems to have supplied the master-clue to the portrayal of the tycoon Smith Ohlrig in Caught. A suggestion of violence suffuses the film, and Caught has often been classified as film noir, though not one blow is struck anywhere in it. What people are feeling when they set it alongside Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or The Big ...”

“... time in earlier communities. Perhaps there is too great a reliance upon certain writers (such as John Aubrey and Philip Stubbes), and arguably the eccentricities of some folkloric approaches are countenanced over-generously: but Laroque would be the first to admit that the sources are fragmentary, and his coverage of a range of anthropological perspectives ...”

“... Independence, all save one or two disagreeable Presidents, together with other famous men such as John Wesley and Columbus, have been posthumously baptised, and there are vast genealogical researches by people who wish to benefit their remote ancestors. The Book of Mormon is not alone among sacred books in claiming to have originated in golden tablets sent ...”

“... from science. The 18th century, the author would have us believe, conveniently turning his back on John Ray and that brilliant company of contemporaries in the later decades of the previous century, was the first age in which nature came under close scientific observation. That Professor Charlton is unsure of his footing on such ground is revealed by the ...”

“... among the English middle classes, the early 20th century was a more genteel time than the 1750s. John Somerville, a youngish English archaeologist, digging in Mesopotamia in the spring of 1914, thinks he may have discovered evidence that would definitively resolve a number of uncertainties in the history of the late Assyrian Empire. Since those uncertainties ...”

“... feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their ...”

“... recounted by Dava Sobel. Rather, her hero, the ‘lone genius’ of her ostentatious subtitle, is John Harrison, a dour Yorkshire carpenter and village choirmaster who spent half a century from the early 1720s trying to make clocks capable of determining longitude and to convince metropolitan grandees that he had done so. Kendall’s watch was a faithful copy ...”

“... principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the art. But Carlyle possessed one ...”