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“... what it is like to be a child, though the occasional exceptions – Dickens, Orwell and Flora Thompson – sketch in the outline of this vast unexplored continent. Perhaps this is one reason why historians have so rarely written about childhood. And even if they do write about it – when discussing the history of education, for example – they often ...”

“... cheers to Charles Marowitz, none to Stoppard. The only solidly informative piece, though, is Ann Thompson’s review of recent feminist works on Shakespeare, which points out incidentally but revealingly that no woman has ever been admitted to the exclusive club which edits the major tragedies. Unlike Michael Bogdanov, who ...”

“... that alert middling urban culture so conspicuously neglected by 18th-century historians from E.P. Thompson to J.C. Clark. Making sense of political prints, their texts and contexts, is thus no easy matter, and they have not been well served by scholars. Art historians have cold-shouldered them, which may be just as well (what mincemeat Hogarth would have made ...”

“... is a public discussion forum dedicated to the conflict in Northern Ireland. It was founded by Michael O’Hare, who, as a young man in County Armagh, had seen the violence and disdain with which British soldiers could treat Catholic families such as his own. In 1976, a British paratrooper shot dead his 12-year-old sister, Majella. Like Andy, ...”

“... essays emphasise Fisher’s career as an outstanding scholar. An important paper by Stephen Thompson shows that he was also a model bishop, residing in his diocese, preaching, ordaining priests in person, generous in his charitable giving. Henry Chadwick offers a sketch of the royal supremacy that Fisher was combating, but discusses it as a matter of ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”

“... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...”

“... sense’ still alarms established authority – as witness recent experiences of Professors Edward Thompson and Michael Pentz with the BBC. At no point does Brecht suggest that ‘popular common sense’ is enough by itself. What he does try to show – repeatedly and variously in different plays – is that ordinary people ...”

“... Jean Renoir was admired by his followers and contemporaries for the relaxed feel of his films. He himself loved the improvisatory quality of the Commedia dell’Arte, which he saw as a struggle between ‘the tendency toward exterior realism and that toward interior realism’, and wrote that what he considered to be ‘the ultimate in cinema as in theatre’ was ‘a style and dialogue that sometimes borders on the burlesque ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... Daily Express would be a Labour newspaper. I expected all the formidable skills of George Malcolm Thompson – or old Greenwich Mean Time, as we used to call the chief leader-writer – to be directed first to securing the leadership of the Labour Party for my hero, Aneurin Bevan. Thereafter, no effort was to be spared in achieving the election of a Labour ...”

“... puts the legendary working-class male who stars as the heroic protagonist in what she calls E.P. Thompson’s ‘melodrama’ firmly in his place: ‘the fatal flaws of misogyny and patriarchy,’ she concludes, ‘ultimately muted the radicalism of the British working class.’ The old idols are not all they seemed and the vicarious sympathies of ...”

“... decade of settlement, with Collins dead, opinions and divisions hardened. The one-time highwayman Michael Howe, who called himself the ‘lieutenant governor of the woods’, had carved out a fiefdom through his control of access to the grasslands, in covert league with leading men in the colony and with a tough squad of convict bushmen to back him. He also ...”

“... Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is cultural, including the Andes ...”

“... is Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, about ballet and the human cost of perfection in it. (Michael Powell, who died recently at 84, was married to Scorsese’s long-time editor Thelma Schoon-maker, and introduces this book, which was originally his idea.) ‘I became fascinated by Anton Walbrook’s character, the impresario Lermontov, whose dedication ...”