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“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... or cruelty – or, more starkly, as eating people – is the central theme of Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar. Her remarkable novel takes up the ancient story of the fall in paradise, and rewrites it in the bleakest terms. This is a book that makes William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the most eminent of its literary forefathers, look like a study in ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”

“... pretty much the same as it did in 1957, when I visited it, curious about the subject on which John Davis has now given us a first-rate, concise and attractively written book. San Nicandro has made only two entrances onto the historical stage. It was an early centre of Italian socialism and agrarian struggle in the grain-fields of northern Apulia, whose ...”

“... from the Great Fire in September 1666. But the burning town wasn’t London. The play was John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, a tragicomedy written half a century earlier, and set on the islands of Ternate and Tidore in what is now Indonesia. The opening stage direction, however, states: ‘The Scene India’. The Island Princess is the only ...”

“... emphasised the natural rights of the people to remove a tyrant who would reduce them to servitude. John Locke, whose work was not immediately influential but had by the 1740s become a vital prop of the Whig regime, upheld the classical definition of liberty as independence. The work of Algernon Sidney, another Whig icon, who was executed by Charles II in ...”

“... sceptic might ask, what purpose can biography now serve? In the Classical world, and then in the Christian one, its function was exemplary. Biographers selected or heightened or invented material in order to create ‘patterns’ that would incite their readers to virtue and deter them from vice. That educational purpose warranted the transformation of life ...”

“... monarchism is in tension with some proto-republican elements. Paulin’s next major monarchist, John Dryden, seems a less ambiguous figure: ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, which Paulin much admires and prints in full, presents the political debate stirred up by the Whigs as a feverish disease of which the body politic needs to be cured. This nostalgia for an ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... from the necessity of taking the sacrament and pronouncing the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ when swearing the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance. The Jews in England reckoned that this privilege might come to them from the Whig government as some sort of reward for their loyal support of the Crown during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and ...”

“... compromise’ of the mid-Seventies, when the Italian Communist Party allied itself with the ruling Christian Democratic Party. In both cases, these broad alliances placed greater emphasis on staying in power than on clarity of policy and often led Parliament to ignore signs of corruption which would have torn the parties apart. In Sicily in the 1870s, Mafia ...”

“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...”

“... biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William ...”