“... walked across the Williamsburg Bridge and wandered around the Lower East Side, looking for the Henry Street building in which Curtis’s great-grandfather had practised medicine at the turn of the last century. They bought nuts and red liquorice and candied ginger from the spice shops on Hester Street and ate dim sum from carts at the big Chinese palace on ...”

“... debate’ – from which it was clear that the premier had an ominous view of his own power. When Nixon jabbed at him with his finger, obliquely referring to the Berlin crisis, Khrushchev jabbed him right back. ‘It sounds to me like a threat,’ he said. ‘We, too, are giants. You wanted to threaten – we will answer threats with ...”

“... in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island Discs, she chose Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest as her favourite book. Carmen wanted younger women, and men, to know that these foremothers had come through the wreckage and thought hard and brilliantly about it – the pregnant heroine of Lehmann’s The Weather in ...”

“... attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a nuclear submarine base in Cuba. There was the coming to power in Chile of what was seen as the radical and anti-American government of President Allende. But the major events it describes do not by themselves account for the fascination of Dr Kissinger’s book. It is the story of how a first-generation German-Jewish ...”

“... give-and-take we find in Compton-Burnett, or in Valéry’s Dialogues – does have its persuasive power. For the while at any rate, we are transported to a pastoral domain where reminiscence, opinion, gossip and verbal playfulness are indulged for all they are worth. And, in Stravinsky’s case, they are worth a good deal. In play as in work, this great ...”

“... Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind’: it would be hard to devise a more off-putting title for Gillian Sutherland’s sympathetic account of the Clough family. It’s slightly misleading too, because her book is not much concerned with religious faith. The history it presents is shaped by faltering Christian conviction among the liberal elites of the 19th century, and the pursuit of justice and progress that survived Christianity’s decline ...”

“... The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.’ The subtitle of Sergey Radchenko’s book makes it sound like an aspirant bestseller from the height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read ...”

“... than excessive snow-ball.’ Stage versions of Frankenstein offered numerous sources of death: Henry Milner’s The Man and the Monster; or the Fate of Frankenstein (1826) ends with the monster fatally stabbing Frankenstein before leaping into the crater of Mount Etna; John Atkinson Kerr’s The Monster and Magician; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1826) has ...”

“... from lack of money; he is now condemned to psychological poverty as well.’ Huxley singled out Henry Ford as the figurehead of this mass-produced society, attacking his belief that workers should be trained not to think creatively in order to keep them subservient. Huxley’s understanding of the logic of Fordism underpins Brave New World, which takes ...”

“... subject of a paperback in France by Gérard de Sède and of a Chronicle film for BBC Television by Henry Lincoln, is the starting-point of the present book. In their investigation of the problems posed by the story, Lincoln and his co-authors begin with the Cathars, and the Cathars lead to the Templars (already the subject of another Chronicle film by ...”

“... in response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Of its many theorists by far the most influential was Henry Maine, a brilliant historian of jurisprudence, barrister, journalist, colonial civil servant and eventually master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Maine made an eloquent case for the historicity and agency of the colonised, as part of an attempt to reconstitute ...”

“... to the modern world as China and India, has implications for how we see American literature. Henry James may have lamented the social thinness of American history, and its apparent inability to generate great writing, but Stein’s formulation makes James look like an incorrigible 19th-century Europhile who failed to recognise that history specifically ...”

“... which was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... feel to live it (confusion, moments of triumph, realisations that it isn’t that easy, surges of power, cross-currents of frustration), but it is not at all the matter of a biography. John Stubbs’s Life of Donne does everything a decent literary biography ought to do. It strives to be imaginative and readable. It evokes the world in which Donne lived, and ...”

“... by Manicheism and other dualist religious systems, and once bishops came to share in the power of Roman emperors, they noted the precedent. Burning alive for beliefs similar to Manicheism was intermittently used in the Christianised Byzantine Empire from the seventh century, though not very often, and the Byzantine burnings ceased soon after Western ...”