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“... architect of genius’, the dust-jacket blithely announces, ‘comparable in stature to Charles Rennie Mackintosh’. Thomson’s rare talent matured suddenly in 1856, at about the time he and his brother George were forming an architectural partnership. The exact nature of Thomson’s relations with his partners remains unclear. George ...”

“... than to research. The problems of identifying political meanings in literature are raised again by Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642, an exciting (if unhappily titled) first book in which a bold argument is advanced with clarity and verve, only to be half-spoiled by overstatement. Butler aims to rescue the drama of the decade before the Civil ...”

“... gay for men to blow-dry their hair. This went on for a while until one day he made the point to Martin Amis that it was actually quite gay to sleep with a woman. GQ is gay in that way: it appears to envy women more than lust for them, and its pages are full of tips on how men should depilate, breast-enlarge, slicken, tart up, and generally make themselves a ...”

“... I chose​ the perfect place to read Martin Rudwick’s book: the Isle of Islay, off the coast of Western Scotland. The archaeology of Islay is a long-standing interest of mine, especially the earliest traces of human settlement, which my excavations suggest took place 12,000 years ago or very soon afterwards. That’s nothing compared to the age of the bedrock of the island, much of which is Precambrian, dating to 1 ...”

“... a hairdresser in the Haymarket, he went to evening classes to learn arithmetic, he worked for Dr Charles Irving in Pall Mall, ‘so celebrated for his successful experiments in making sea water fresh’. But he found metropolitan life expensive and soon went back to sea (later, he accompanied Dr Irving on a voyage of exploration to the Arctic). After a final ...”

“... Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple ...”

“... a volume written as an exercise in academic sociology. This was Art Students Observed (1973), by Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, part of Faber’s Society Today and Tomorrow series. The authors’ research was funded by the Social Science Research Council. One suspects that Madge took the leading role in the book, not only because of seniority but ...”

“... Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred men and women who had been ...”

“... that it would not otherwise espouse. Here is the unreconstructed ‘engine of comedy’, Rex Martin (‘the famous farting novelist’) and his diminutive son, Felix. Here is ‘Jillian Burnes’, a transsexual romancer. But these knockabout cartoons are absorbed into a chiaroscuro of the forgotten, denizens of the deep recalled and re-remembered. The ...”

“... also tended to work with micro-histories, rather than offering panoramic surveys. The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) is a study of a man who impersonated a woman’s husband thought to have been killed in the wars, and of how the impersonation affected a small French village in the 16th century. The bogus Martin Guerre ...”

“... published a generation ago, in 1959, which includes over a hundred pages on Spanish painting by Martin Soria. Brown’s account differs from Soria’s in several important respects. In the first place, it makes some significant changes to the canon. One of the artists revalued is Juan Bautista Maino (a follower of Caravaggio who more or less gave up ...”

“... Reviewing a new edition of Ulysses in 1986, Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet ...”

“... marketing. A seat on the museum’s Board of Trustees was vacated long ago by the resignation of Martin Kemp. No art historian of equivalent seniority can, it seems, be persuaded to fill it. A collection of essays entitled The New Museology suggests where suitable candidates may be found. Paul Greenhalgh is one. He cheerfully announces that ‘in these times ...”

“... that is both universal and domestic. Dunn’s book is far from alone in its attention to home. Charles Causley’s admirers will be pleased with the new collection, A Field of Vision, in which, as the blurb stresses, ‘he comes home again and again.’ Linguistically more adventurous is George Campbell Hay’s Seeker, Reaper, a single poem in ...”

“... coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were ...”