“... Acropolis is the first thing you see in The Romance of Ruins, the current exhibition at the John Soane Museum (until 5 September). The unfinished watercolour is dominated by the eastern portico of the Parthenon, the ancient temple dedicated to the city’s patron goddess, Athena the Virgin. But the picture also shows a small and elegant mosque inside ...”

“... drew his coloured strata directly onto a base map, made in 1794 by his publisher, the cartographer John Cary, before the fifteen sheets were engraved by assist­ants onto copper plates ready for reprinting – a process that took two years. He made several versions of the map during his lifetime, many of which he neither numbered nor named. Some of these ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”

“... ones thereafter with a yawn that becomes progressively harder to stifle as you reach the age of Major and Blair. The prime minister alone, as Hennessy reminds us, can activate the codes for a nuclear strike. The only one to authorise such a strike was Churchill: the 1943 Quebec Agreement meant that he had to give the go-ahead for Hiroshima and ...”

“... of the system undertaken to restore popular legitimacy. All three Reform Acts were followed by major legislative initiatives which tried to meet perceived popular demands. Each time there was alarm among conservatives, but the overwhelming effect was to reform the party system along cleaner, more functional lines and thus to energise and validate the ...”

“... from which it has emanated’. He extended his evolutionism into ethics and religion in his last major book, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, of 1932, where, for example, he compares two forms of morality: a morality of ‘pressure’, or social obligation, which is more or less static, is founded on habit or dumb acceptance of its rules and ...”

“... of New Labour. Every other country in the European Union, the ten prospective new entrants and major members of the Commonwealth such as India and Australia have written constitutions which define clearly and precisely the balance of power between the legislature, executive and judiciary. At a time when it has never been easier for the state to act ...”

“... as Kushner notes – lends itself to biography, which is why there have been at least two major ones in recent years: the pedestrian Life with Monte Cristo by Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Louis Sheaffer’s masterly Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume account, O’Neill: Son and Playwright and O’Neill: Son and Artist. (Dowling’s biography frequently ...”

“... by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom Manchester, not least because of his war experiences, clearly did not like. The Krupps were ...”

“... households; it is unequal, with a high Gini coefficient by European standards, and major disparities in health outcomes between classes and ethnicities; and it is a travel hub, with 23.7 million international arrivals in the first three months of 2020. In other words, the UK is crowded, old, fat, cramped, unequal and much visited, and all of ...”

“... and, simultaneously, the man who was Traven first moved tentatively out of the shadows. When John Huston set about filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1946, he woke one morning to see a small man standing in his Mexican hotel room, offering a card which introduced him as Hal Croves, Traven’s trusted agent. Croves worked for Huston as an ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... union city into one in whose political and cultural life labour is only a shadowy presence. A major contribution to understanding the city’s past, Working-Class New York is also a milestone in American labour history. As in Britain, there was a remarkable transformation in this subject in the two decades after 1965. Inspired by the work of E.P. Thompson ...”