“... 1760s, conceals beneath its plump spout a delicately painted ‘45’ in reference to Number 45 of John Wilkes’s Radical paper the North Briton, which attacked Lord Bute’s ministry as ‘the foul dregs of power, the tools of corruption and despotism’. The issue was ordered to be burned, with the usual consequence that ...”

“... offered some protection against the boredoms of the period. Vacuous political golfing parties at North Berwick were part of his upbringing, and not all house-parties had eminences like Rosebery or Haldane (‘the brain of Socrates and the shape of Nero’) to give them an intellectual element. More often there was a Philistinism about such gatherings which ...”

“... frame-houses are light: you can move them about – people quite often do. In a lot to the north of the city you can see dozens of bungalows – even a few two-storey houses – lined up like second-hand cars. The price (NZ$30,000) includes delivery and placing on piles, and you can walk through the houses, working out just how you might bring together ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... For the girl has agreed to adoption: the baby is given to the Smiths of Seattle. They name him John, a choice that Alexie uses to signal a well-meaning lack of imagination, and when John Smith grows up, Indian-born but raised by whites, he will become the chief suspect in the search for the Indian Killer. It’s not an ...”

“... Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers and editors do the work he wants to help with – they keep going some intelligent conversation about ...”

“... unity is currently being challenged by the Northern League, which seeks to divide the prosperous North from the bureaucratic capital in Rome and the poorer regions of the South, it is useful to reread Mack Smith’s account of the Risorgimento and the origins of Italian unification. Italy is a recent invention. Even in ancient times, while enjoying political ...”

“... Panic on the peninsula. Outrage in North Greenwich. The gas-holder, familiar to motorists skirting the perimeter fence of what is now the site of The Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA ...”

“... bankruptcy in Northumberland. There were the justifiable grievances among the Episcopalians in north-east Scotland, and the more general and equally justified sense of national outrage in Scotland as a whole produced by the shabby backtracking on the explicit and implicit promises of the Union bargain by post-Union Parliaments. Altogether in 1715 there was ...”

“... were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... population in the city of some five hundred. (They seem to have lodged for the most part north of the river: Vallès’s recorded addresses were in Kentish Town, off Oxford Street and in Bloomsbury, all plaque-less to this day no doubt, though Red Ken, before he faded to a more electable off pink, might have thought of honouring this most ragingly ...”

“... as blunt, uncourtly and dressed always in black, Walsingham has long defied categorisation. John Cooper’s book is a fresh attempt to assess the accuracy of these opposing images. It charts Walsingham’s life from his birth in 1531 or 1532, on the cusp of the Henrician Reformation and the break with Rome, through his education at King’s ...”

“... befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own ...”

“... that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a large question on which Calder must have long deliberated before striking out his path. There has been discussion lately as to ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”