“... garden, which he has hired for a drinking party. Extracts from all these accounts are printed by Philip Mansel in his stylish and affectionate history of Aleppo alongside those of later Victorian visitors, who are focused on an eternal round of consular picnics and drinking parties, punctuated by sardonic observations on the ersatz taste and slovenliness of ...”

“... all non-Lutheran Protestantism Calvinist. Gillian Lewis, in a fine essay on Geneva, shows how short-lived were the claims of that declining and divided city to a theological and administrative sovereignty which in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson ...”

“... in 1887, no one took much notice. But when Arthur Conan Doyle repackaged Holmes and Watson in short stories for the Strand Magazine, the trifle improvised for pin money by a struggling young doctor soon turned into an apotheosis that bemused, enriched and finally exasperated him. He tried to exorcise the incubus by killing Holmes off, but resurrected him ...”

“... Instead the British government has committed to the Saudi position. As foreign secretary, Philip Hammond pledged that Britain would continue to ‘support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat’. This is not only complicity but direct participation in a war that is as much the West’s as it ...”

“... and Béarn follow. Dijon does not have a famous author, but two immensely powerful Valois dukes, Philip the Bold and his son John the Fearless, who built up a great library through purchases, gifts and commissions. Savoy, seat of the crusading Count Amédée VI and his heirs, is an appropriate location for Denis Renevey’s discussion of pan-European ...”

“... simultaneously expresses defeat and triumph, abjection and attainment, resignation and resolve. In short, it was a version of Palestine, lived in all its complexity by one of the finest Palestinians of our time. Ibrahim – a relentlessly articulate man – will be remembered less for his writing, which was relatively sparse, than for his ability to organise ...”

“... of Braudel’s other book, the celebrated Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.1 In both works, the chronological account of what happened is left until last, coming almost as an anti-climax after a prolonged analysis of the parameters, preconditions and pressures which (according to Braudel) determined that particular ...”

“... as ducal ones in the marriage market. A second shift comes with the last two chapters, virtually a short history of the Regency, in which Saint-Simon is mostly relegated to the background. While there is plenty of interest in this section, it is not really about the Court as such, when it would have been helpful to have some specific assessment of what the old ...”

“... is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art, famous for introducing the term ‘International Style’, assumed, in Johnson’s phrase, that Wright was ‘the greatest American architect of ...”

“... from earlier fiction (they appear under their own names in the most recent collection of Apple’s short stories, Free Agents). No doubt the daughter is as charming and self-possessed in real life as she is in these pages, but too often she (or her brother, or Rocky, or Apple himself, or the dog) perfectly rounds out or caps a given chapter or exchange. What ...”

“... to me here. The only other place I have seen the word ‘corpun’ in print is in the Letters of Philip Larkin. As a neologism, it is as ugly as any one could contrive, but as a salacious expression and – apparently – as a piece of authentic Englishry, it was very close to his core.)The key phrase in Captain Waterhouse’s distraught peroration above is ...”

“... and others who have been most affected by Aids in this country, I usually felt I was selling them short.’ You cannot easily put art about Aids in the art-only box: it is part of a dialogue, between those who have the disease and those who don’t, in which the personal, the imaginative and the technical are intertwined. Garfield must take on Derek Jarman as ...”

“... to accept the golden ball of discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two ...”

“... and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these developments affected ...”

“... no intelligence assets in Guatemala’s army, trade unions, government or Communist Party – in short, it didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in the country. Lacking local knowledge, it drew parallels with Russia, Eastern Europe, China and Korea, portraying events ‘as part of a global pattern of communist activity’. An unredacted part of ...”