“... Tooze shows that in the first year of the war the share of national output going to the military rose by 60 per cent. Hitler resisted pressure from his advisers to prepare for a long war because he believed – correctly – that Germany could not win a long war. Instead, he insisted on the massive expansion of programmes for aircraft production, ammunition ...”

“... of the Spanish monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious papers which he ...”

“... I am not a travel writer,’ Jonathan Raban said in a recent interview. ‘For me, “travel writer” means someone who samples other people’s holidays – you talk about the food, the hotel, throw in a bit of local colour. If I thought that was the business I was in, I’d slit my throat.’ Bad Land, Raban’s new book about Montana, examines the present remains and historical origins of the last great wave of American western settlement, the migration of homesteaders to eastern Montana in the first decade of this century ...”

“... reasons Mr Ponting felt that he should steer clear of me. As Bruce Laughland, his counsel, and Jonathan Caplan, the deputy counsel, were to reiterate in court, they were counsel for Mr Ponting and not Mr Dalyell. There were differences. For example, before the trial Mr Ponting said he did not share my contention that the Belgrano was sunk, above all ...”

“... give up their boas and beads if they could help it. The revues of the early Fifties which featured Jonathan Miller still had their quota of rouged youths. But at long last the IQ level of the Footlights rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter ...”

“... social and economic problems – which is why winning the World Cup was held to be so important. Jonathan Fenby’s fine book, On the Brink: The Trouble with France, explores the multi-faceted nature of this crisis, from the decline of the baguette to widespread political corruption. Many British observers (though not Fenby) derive a certain amount of ...”

“... denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own interpretations. In Norris’s ...”

“... shape.‘You won’t need your putter,’ the Colonel said.In the second week of April, Arthur Rose, a lieutenant in ‘A’ Troop and a solicitor in peacetime, spotted a ragged copy of the magazine lying among the dust and cigarette ends on the top floor of the San Lorenzo tower, which had been used as an observation post by both the British and the ...”

“... in terms of the future rather than the past; as the architect Arthur Penty (quoted by Margaret Rose) observed in 1922, ‘Post-Industrialism connotes Medievalism.’ But theological modernists, like the English Catholic George Tyrrell, saw Medievalism as incompatible with modernity and banished it to the Middle Ages where it took on the static quality ...”

“... China and – in the phrase of anguished Americans who backed the wrong horse – he lost China. Jonathan Fenby starts his important new biography, the first of substance for a quarter of a century, in Xi’an in 1936 when Chiang, after his 50th birthday, was preparing to bash the Communists. Having ignored the local armed forces’ evident reluctance to ...”

“... Post’, a cross between ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Wendy Cussons’, from the National Rose Society’s Annual) and of rather dull canapés (from Good Housekeeping Colour Cookery of 1967). Nothing, it seemed, was so distant, hidden or commonplace that its appearance would be unrecorded for long. Bert Hardy, who was present at the D-Day landings and ...”

“... And so, in 1989, when bulldozers in Southwark accidentally laid bare the foundations first of the Rose Theatre and then of the Globe, a furore began fit to astonish any passing Elizabethan ghost. The possibility that one of these sites might fall prey to property developers generated more squeaking and gibbering in the London streets than you could shake a ...”

“... be judiciously and authoritatively assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more than seventy items, while the various Hughes archives contain nearly a hundred thousand pages of manuscript material. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 ...”

“... of England’ frames the admirably quizzical histories of the British world since 1660 by Jonathan Clark and Robert Skidelsky. Clark is terrier-like, an anti-Whig revisionist who worries at every unexamined assumption he encounters. (While he distances himself from Whig mythologies, his preface was written from Callaly Castle, Northumberland, which ...”

“... in the monumental AV preface are all taken from the Geneva Bible. One of the sub-narratives of Jonathan Rose’s recent study of English autodidacticism, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes,* is the rise and fall of the Bible in working-class life. Beginning with 16th-century figures such as Henry Hart, who ‘led a group of about ...”