“... modern shapes. Much of it survives in use at Windsor and if Her Majesty dips into this volume she may be puzzled by the stern tone in which Clive Wainwright endorses Pugin’s ‘quite proper’ renunciation of her ‘horrific’ furniture, most of which is considered too distressing to illustrate. In Dr Wainwright’s disapproval we hear an authentic echo of ...”

“... to be a volunteer from the neighbouring republic of Daghestan, and who said that while there may not be many volunteers at the moment (there certainly were not, as far as we could tell), a continuing Russian operation would inflame the North Caucasus and make terrorists of the unemployed youth for decades. All of this went into Gritchin’s rambling ...”

“... The same disenchantment with Marxism that has deglamorised the Italian and Yugoslav partisans may now allow a more positive evaluation of the German Resistance. Historians are less preoccupied by the Resisters’ notions of the kind of government that should succeed Hitler’s and, in Chancellor Kohl’s assertive term, are perhaps less scandalised by ...”

“... the excursion trains to the hanging a merciful ignorance of such imperatives prevailed. Some of us may doubt whether the Victorious, at any social level, took their etiquette books seriously. Such works may have been found in every middle-class home, but had they any higher standing than Joe Miller’s jest-book in an ...”

“... clear that he wanted the job less than his mother wanted it for him; and in that, at least, he may have shown good judgment. Like so many royal biographies, this book is devoid of any real historical perspective. It is excessively informative and inadequately interpretative, and is written in the sort of coy and courtly language which the events of 1992 ...”

“... corner, are not perfect. And tyres can change their temperature during the race, as Senna’s may have done after he’d had to follow the slow-circuit car for four laps. (Schumacher noticed that the Williams hit the ground at Tamburello a moment before Senna braked. Cool tyres could have caused this.) It’s for these reasons that the electronic devices ...”

“... closeness to go to the point of raising issues of textuality, partiality and readability. These may be omissions that go with the territory of traditional biography, but, in the case of Mallarmé, it seems, at the very least, ironic. Rather than speculating about unconscious signification, discontinuity among documents or textual ambiguity, Millan sticks to ...”

“... in the essay, yet the transitions are so vertiginous, the self-contradictions so blatant (they may of course be innate characteristics of ‘fantastic literary criticism’), that the whole seems less than a sum of the parts. At times, too, Pushkin the poet proves too protean even for Sinyavsky’s sudden changes of course. He quotes ‘The ...”

“... or Kurt Weill, brittle and easy, wearing their sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long while/From May to December ... ’ Louis Untermeyer, in an enthusiastic letter written in 1926, when The Wild Party was just a naughty manuscript ...”

“... the best books in the entire literature on the sociology of revolution. This is a compliment which may not be welcomed unequivocally by Knight himself, who takes a dim view of sociologists and documents some good reasons for doing so. But for all his awareness of the importance of chance events and the vagaries of individual motivation, he is never disposed to ...”

“... it summons up which shows that the Palliser thesis is only half-right. For decades, the people may have been ignorant, but the politicians were not. This Falklands retrospective was commissioned by BBC Radio, and the interviews it prints with many of the major participants on both sides contain much material that could not be broadcast, the first import of ...”

“... and those who advocated the decisive revolutionary stroke. It’s often forgotten (including, I may say, by Kagarlitsky) how much else apart from ‘gradualism’ was accepted by the gradualists. British, French and German official socialists reconciled themselves to the continuation of Empire, to the maintenance of a class system, and finally, to the ...”

“... herself has survived has made, as she insists, ‘not the least difference’. The conclusion may be a little too Hitchcockian for comfort, but Sheila Kohler’s book is more than a skilfully assembled amnesiac thriller. The narrator’s distancing tone could easily have been more offputting than it actually is. Although her recourse to negative ...”

“... in 1914), firmly and misleadingly declared that the writer’s affair with Louise Colet ‘may be considered as the only sentimental episode of any importance in Flaubert’s life’. In 1967 Enid Starkie prefaced her two-volume account with a portrait of ‘Gustave Flaubert by an unknown painter’ – thereby managing to rip off his entire face in ...”

“... Enchaîné, Gerson evokes memories of clerical anguish about masturbation; students of Erasmus may also too readily accept his delight in belittling an author he had studied as a boy. Dr Brown’s approach, a most fruitful one, is to concentrate on Gerson’s writing and preaching for simple folk, with its concern for morality, its seeds of Gallicanism and ...”