“... emerged two centuries after the Romans retreated from Britain and covered the area now bordered by Long Acre and Kingsway to the north. The authors suggest that superstition might have led the Anglo-Saxons to build outside the old Roman walls: did they imagine ghosts as they ‘surveyed from afar the colossal wreck, boundless and bare, of the Roman ...”

“... that accumulate to set a marked distance between ourselves and our predecessors. Sixty years is long enough even for those who were alive at the time to look back with some astonishment on the ordinary arrangements of the day. Consider W.J. Turner – admittedly a new and uncertain driver – driving to Warminster in second gear and not unnaturally ...”

“... may well feel Gradground out of comprehension: the issue of ‘the way of life’ seems for long periods to have been totally forgotten. Yet Ladurie does once again have a story to tell, and once again it is one of considerable interest and provocation, even to the insularly English reader. The story is one of collapse, recovery, ‘stagflation’ and ...”

“... than that of the old; they found sudden loss more difficult to cope with than losses they had long anticipated; they relied on family and friends for comfort in times of bereavement; they took solace from memories of the dead, whom they were inclined, at least in the early stages of their grief, to idealise. Some of our received opinions about the ...”

“... metaphoric and local suggestion, that there can be no genuine ‘theory of translation’ so long as there is no satisfactory ‘theory’ of how the human mind produces meaningful speech, let alone interlingual transfers of such speech). Kelly’s position is an intermediate one; though he rejects the meta-mathematical formalism of certain paradigms of ...”

“... sisters: they are genetically identical. Reading Hamilton, Wilson might well have complained, as T.H Huxley did when he read Darwin: ‘How stupid not to have thought of that.’ But thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of the ant world, a mathematical syllogism became a science of life itself. In the UK, Richard Dawkins is often credited with Hamilton’s ...”

“... unlikely, and apparently unconscious, present-day continuator is Conor Cruise O’Brien. In The Long Affair O’Brien presents himself as an original and incorruptible outsider prepared not only to challenge the vested interests of Jeffersonian hagiography, but to exclude Jefferson from the American civil religion. O’Brien’s Jefferson presides as high ...”

“... in Britain in the years between the 1780s and the 1830s on which he lavished such attention have long since ceased to be the focus of contemporary political debate. More plausibly – the array of puffs assembled for this new edition encourages this thought – some contemporary readers may hope to find in the book a convincing repudiation of the forms of ...”

“... vital messages from the Athenaeum: ‘I did not bring my ordinary walking great coat – only that long water-proof: so I have to walk about in it, having nothing else.’ Then, on 27 November 1912, to Charles Gifford: ‘You will be grieved and shocked to hear Emma died this morning shortly after nine o’clock.’ There follow, besides the usual replies to ...”

“... damn thing’ of the artless chronicle principally by making The Mirror and the Light continue the long, diffuse revenge plot that unifies the first two volumes of the trilogy. Her Thomas Cromwell is a loyal servant of Cardinal Wolsey. In Bring Up the Bodies he revenged himself on those who engineered his master’s fall by having them executed along with Anne ...”

“... suggests that they may all have been called after someone who had made a name for himself not too long before. But who was he? And was he Roman, or British, or something in between?The major candidate is Lucius Artorius Castus. His career is recorded on two inscriptions found in Croatia, which Higham carefully edits, translates and comments on. He seems to ...”

“... the Great War. In addition, as an unlikely arrival at the top of the Labour Party, Attlee, for long a permanently contingent leader among noisily ambitious and more glamorous colleagues, knew the value of inscrutable silence. Bew deftly captures the many sides of a supposedly limited personality. In our current crisis, which is much worse than Suez in ...”

“... observing the different varieties of domesticated pigeon in the south of England, from the long-necked carrier to the cuddly short-faced tumbler, might assign them to as many as twenty separate species; but in fact all of them could be traced back to the common rock-pigeon, modified by selective breeding over the previous century. ‘The key,’ Darwin ...”

“... Gladstone would have recognised these intimations: he felt them at recurring moments both in his long political career and in his personal religious and philosophical life. Why then are we not more eager to attend to Gladstone’s revisions and recantations as the forerunners of our own? Why is David Bebbington’s The Mind of Gladstone such a lonely ...”

“... and useful. Dewey was the most prominent intellectual in the United States for much of his long life (1859-1952). Though he earned his bread as a philosophy professor, he wrote on everything. His range is suggested by the table of contents of the last of the 37 volumes of the magnificent new edition of his published works – an edition which it has ...”