“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... business,’ observed his diametrical opposite, Lloyd George. Volume One of the new biography by David Dilks uses the voluminous Chamberlain diaries and letters drawn upon by Feiling, but supplements them with a mass of public and private archives not available in 1944. It elaborates in a quarter of a million words themes dealt with by Feiling in fifty ...”

“... a Lieutenant Bridgman in the Régiment de Clare, one of the Wild Geese mercenaries of the French Army, who was killed at the battle of Lauffeld in 1747. Housman admired the mercenary unstintingly. Their shoulders held the sky suspended;   They stood, and earth’s foundations stay; Whom God abandoned, these defended,   And saved the sum of things ...”

“... the Bon Marché was not an isolated enterprise but that it typified, not merely Paris stores, but French society as a whole. ‘Bourgeois culture in France was divided within itself, not so much between upper and lower bourgeoisie or the forces of progress and stagnation as between two sets of values and attitudes, one that drove it to create what the other ...”

“... Van Gogh and others in the mainstream Modernist tradition, but in order to salvage Menzel for his French-oriented vision of art history, Meier-Graefe had to make a rigorous distinction between the progressive artist of the early ‘private’ pictures such as Rear Courtyard and House (1844) or Balcony Room (1845) and the conventional public artist whose ...”

“... find myself at every international conference where the participating countries are identified in French – Royaume Uni – sitting next to a little Portuguese) was coming to the end of his peroration. Not, really, that it makes the slightest difference to the conclusions of a meeting, what ministers say at it. Everything is decided, horse-traded off, by ...”

“... high polls at Rochdale and he tells us that if he had agreed to fight Edinburgh Central he had David Steel’s ‘generous’ promise that, if he lost, he would be recommended for the Lords. As a communicator he has met or interviewed everybody and travelled everywhere; and he has sufficient faith in television as a universal educator to say that, in this ...”

“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”

“... the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson story mainly as an early introduction to the power of ...”

“... provided a framework for the making and showing of propaganda films. Roel vande Winkel and David Welch’s essay collection, Cinema and the Swastika, widens the picture much further. In the mid-1930s, the Nazis began covertly acquiring cinemas and cinema chains around the world, while at the same time expanding the international distribution of German ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... series of events: George III’s deliverance from insanity in 1789, swiftly followed by the French Revolution; the long and intensely bitter European war; a pandemic of bovine Tory patriotism; and the union with Ireland in 1800. Pitt used these events to redefine the political centre around himself, and to make men like Charles look dangerously radical ...”

“... under the joint tutelage of James and Conrad. The Good Soldier is often described as the finest French novel ever written in English, and it might also be thought of as the finest Conrad novel ever written in English. It is a book about betrayal, about the realisation that moral soundness allied to high tone and high colour is compatible with sexual and ...”

“... taste whether readers will like Glas. which Hartman calls ‘a scandalous literary pudding, a French trifle’. He admits there will be many who find Derrida’s style ‘exhibitionistic’ and ‘cheapened’. He does not claim that Derrida is unique, but acknowledges Derrida’s debt to the ‘heavier Heidegger’. Also, the use of puns and other ...”

“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”