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“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... tradition of directly translating subjective impressions into economic terms’. Even Richard Wollheim, who rarely rises above an abject appreciativeness in his dealings with Freud, concedes that Freud ‘sometimes treated propositions about energy and its liberation as though they were descriptions of introspectible phenomena’. This ...”

“... drill (a later bronze based on the figure is in the Tate collection) or of certain rusted hulks by Richard Serra. And Duchamp again, in the central rotunda, where a digger’s bucket lies on the floor like a big cartoon citation of his snow-shovel readymade of 1915, In Advance of the Broken Arm. Nelson surely intends the ladder-like framework of rusting metal ...”

“... might be. The inclusion of a few canvases sets up interesting tensions. George Frederic Watts may have been Cameron’s mentor in developing a modern heroic portraiture, yet when their respective visions of Tennyson’s daughter-in-law May Prinsep are set side by side, I find that his tremulous, scrawny brushwork sets ...”

“... 186 stanzas of the ‘Testament’ are interspersed with songs, letters and ballads, some of which may not belong; in these, the voice of resignation, of the angel succumbing to his fall, is at its clearest. So is the sense of loss. The Villon we hear, even in translation, is debarred from two cities – 15th-cenrury clerical Paris and the City of God, a ...”

“... defying body and convention to ‘soar like an eagle’ in the way of the blessed inebriate in Richard Thompson’s song ‘God Loves a Drunk’ (‘His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises/To kick-start his mind now and then’)? Timothy Neat writes not in order to leave his late friend in a heap on the floor, least of all the floor of ...”

“... Persons and Parts, without changing their Minds or Affection.’ This contemporary Jesuit critique may have been a counsel of perfection, but Parsons had undoubtedly put his finger on a real weakness in the Marian settlement. Pole himself lamented the necessity of employing the Henrician episcopate and parish clergy to undo the schism they had helped ...”

“... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...”

“... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse ...”

“... in the same city in 1968, when politics was still for real. (The Mayor of Chicago is still called Richard Daley, but with the mediocre son all resemblance ends.) The irony, such as it was, occurred at the expense of the journalistic profession, which is why I say that they awoke, or half-awoke, to what they had done. Ever since the preceding Republican ...”

“... nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all would-be revolutionaries; and one suspects that those ...”

“... Vaizey has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war ...”

“... sequence of dreary rhyming couplets at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th ...”

“... self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle. Richard Bourke is a formidably talented political historian whose Empire and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has read widely and deeply in Hegel – not for some of us the most enthralling way of passing ...”

“... well-chronicled activities in France and historically decisive foundation of Normandy. All four may be described as coffee-table books, and all four sustain their publishers’ well-earned reputation for superb illustrations – though a symbolic reductio ad absurdum of modern techniques is the obliteration of much of David Wilson’s foreword to The Viking ...”