“... human thought … echoed from England all over Europe … Harrington, Locke, Newton, Hume and Adam Smith gave the lead to the whole of Europe. Richardson and Fielding, building on 17th-century spiritual autobiographies, and on the writings of Bunyan and Defoe, created the novel, the dominant literary form of the modern age.’ If we consider these claims, we ...”

“... playing an East Asian Moriarty opposite old Burma hand and fully accredited special agent Nayland Smith – Sherlock Holmes with a face ‘sun-baked to the hue of coffee’ – and stalwart Dr (of course) Petrie, who, like his Baker Street predecessor, tells the story and gets the girl. Nayland Smith and Petrie exist in a ...”

“... campaign for the mayoralty, which the long-serving Tom Bradley is about to relinquish. Businessman Richard Riordan, one of 24 candidates to succeed him, seems to be promising that all the unpleasantness of South Central will somehow be removed. He puts it less plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a ...”

“... banal, its excess evident in the seepage beyond the black borders of the US. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s crafty layering in Fifty Shades of White echoes the creation of this elaborate fiction, a fiction that continues to exercise an extraordinary, destructive power. I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British ...”

“... 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the ...”

“... Too honest to ignore the similarity to supposed Puritan ideals of the work of the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford, who wrote in the 1520s, Collinson is compelled to treat Catholic Humanists as proto-Puritans – which weakens his claim that it was Puritan divines who held a distinctively Puritan attitude to the family. Moreover, he is led into caricaturing ...”

“... History. The chapter on Southern Africa in the 19th century by Christopher Saunders and Iain Smith benignly suggests that ‘British troops repeatedly intervened to play a crucial role in supporting settlers who were unable on their own to displace African farmers.’ No attempt is made to describe what ‘intervention’ or ‘displacement’ might have ...”

“... for the quick sketch that captured the essence of a man in a few physical details. Logan Pearsall Smith called him ‘the Rembrandt of English prose’. In his French Revolution, his private letters, and elsewhere, he dashes off one vignette after another. Fred Kaplan quotes one of the less well-known of these cameo portraits, depicting the French historian ...”

“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... Richard Wollheim’s memoir of his childhood, roughly a third of which appeared in two recent issues of the London Review (15 April and 20 May), is to be published in its entirety in September by the Waywiser Press. In his obituary of Wollheim in the Independent last November, John Richardson wrote that Germs – which Wollheim thought ‘the best piece of work’ he had ‘ever done’ – ‘must not be allowed to become a chef d’oeuvre inconnu ...”

“... photographers – seemed to want to write for the Magazine, then under the editorship of Godfrey Smith. It was both a serious and a very glamorous publication, soon to be the apogee of photo-journalism; its style was a vital part of the machinery of ‘the Sixties’ – all hard to imagine now. The newspaper itself was perhaps the best in the world, well ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... other Inspector Grant novels, in a handsome new edition with an introduction by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s an odd sort of crime novel, because there isn’t really a crime. Detective Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is laid up in hospital with a broken leg, having fallen through a trapdoor in pursuit of a criminal; his friends bring him contemporary ...”

“... difficult to agree when the series of murders began. The killing in April 1888 of Emma Elizabeth Smith was probably a street robbery and gang-rape, but is sometimes reckoned as the first of the Whitechapel murderer’s crimes. The murder on 7 August of Martha Tabram is attributed by some to an unidentified soldier while others identify it as the first of the ...”

“... other (welcome) inclusions and omissions that reflect the work done by scholars in recent decades: Richard Bulliet on the economic importance of the camel, Andrew Watson on the role of the Arabs as introducers of new crops, Oleg Grabar on the Dome of the Rock, and so on. It is, however, a tribute to both the scope and depth of Lewis’s research in the past ...”