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“... had just emerged from another devastating civil conflict, in which the current President, Charles Taylor, played a leading role. A former Government minister who fell out with the military regime of Samuel Doe, Taylor managed to escape from a Massachusetts jail in 1985: he was being held pending extradition on embezzlement ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... affect the outcomes of the pandemic are nothing to do with the policy choices made by leaders. As John Lanchester wrote in the LRB (16 December 2021), the UK population is older and more obese than that in many other countries, and we live in crowded cities and have an unequal society, all of which makes us, collectively, more susceptible to Covid-19. On the ...”

“... new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the ...”

“... me today? A book of virtually nine hundred pages on F.E. Smith, first Earl of Birkenhead, by John Campbell, has appeared on my desk this morning. John Campbell has written first-rate biographies. I even have a vague recollection that F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was once a figure of some political importance, probably ...”

“... statements, and the points of view they express clash head-on. The lectures were given by Charles Taylor (‘Philosophy and its History’ and by Richard Rorty (‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’). They disagree not just over the ‘relation of philosophy to its history’ but in their conception of the kind of society we live in and of the ...”

“... one, not least for the unexpected light it shines on India’s emergence as a nation state. Miles Taylor is better known as a historian of Chartism and Victorian radical politics generally, but this background comes in handy here, as he takes the queen out of court politics and into the popular arena, where she proves surprisingly at home. Throughout his ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... which comes out too in his treatment of Blunt, Burgess, Driberg, and a civil servant called John Cairncross. All these geese become swans in Pincher’s skilled hands. How unfair to suggest that they were small fry, dilettanti, wartime temporary agents or upper-class decadents. Blunt, in particular, he praises as an agent of a supreme professionalism ...”

“... Salvidge and Sir Thomas White. Even Labour followed the example thus set, in the person of John Braddock, a founder member of the Communist Party who lapsed into respectability. Perhaps one should include his wife Bessie in the list. Equally special was the composition of the Liverpool electorate in its changing form. Religion, or, as Waller’s title ...”

“... their families to the coast. The inspiration behind the scheme was George Lansbury, the subject of John Shepherd’s biography, a book as meticulous as it is generous. It is nonetheless timely: just as the prison service has brown-filled this pleasant site, so, too, New Labour has trampled on the radical socialism of which Lansbury was one of the finest ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style took on added significance when ...”

“... had gout and was just going to have to put up with it. The third of Hogarth’s ‘undertakers’, John ‘Chevalier’ Taylor (1703-72), seems to have been an evident crook, who boasted of his success at seducing patients, talked what he called the ‘true Ciceronian’ (i.e. always ending every period with a verb), may ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... Benn is fashionably unfashionable. The smoking classes have had no better champion since John Wayne. The nation’s youth have another icon on which to click. What makes his resuscitation the more beguiling is that New Labour’s project has been built on an emphatic rejection of Bennism. In 1981, backed by the hard Left in the unions and the ...”