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“... G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages and ...”

“... technical and inaccessible. This is the sort of attitude which was expressed in a recent review by Roger Scruton,* who is, among other things, a philosopher, and certainly does not think that he despises philosophy as such. He claimed that philosophy should ‘say something useful to the ordinary person’, and should give him ‘help in confronting the moral ...”

“... ages, sexes and conditions’. Some argued that Native Americans had their own codes of civility: Roger Williams wrote that the Algonquian people with whom he had lived were ‘of two sorts (as the English are)’, some ‘rude and clownish’, but most having ‘a savour of civility and courtesy … both amongst themselves and towards strangers’. Having ...”

“... vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to that extent. It ...”

“... apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I envy. My ...”

“... and a harbinger of disorder. Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a full-length biography since Roger Lockyer’s in 1981, but the 400th anniversary of James I’s death next year has given Hughes-Hallett her opportunity. At more than six hundred pages, The Scapegoat is long, but Buckingham’s rise and fall is told in a succession of short, vivid ...”

“... a couple of blocks from the Hudson River, in a pleasant apartment shared with the bookdealers, Roger and Irvyne Richards, the dedicatees (‘slayers of homelessness’) of Corso’s last substantial collection, Mindfield (1989). Herbert Huncke and Peter Orlovsky also hang out at the book room, living exhibits, marginals whose work has never quite been ...”

“... a canonisation of him and a celebration of her own literary career. (‘Fanny’s last novel’, Roger Lonsdale called it in his biography of Charles Burney.) Yet she recovered and left to us a hoard of paper that makes Burney a biographer’s dream: the letters and journals that she lugged back and forth across the Channel, and which at present constitute ...”

“... in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was born in 1843 into a family that Logan Pearsall Smith described as a ‘fine old succession of country people, “quality folk” as they are called’, but with more interest in the arts than many such families. The Jekylls had a life-size cast of the Venus de Milo in the dining-room. They moved to Surrey ...”

“... In adjacent fields social history has achieved surprising levels of sophistication, capped by Roger Cooter’s provocative study of phrenology as an intellectual instrument of self-help liberalism and social control (The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, 1984). But hardly any attempt has been made to apply this sort of approach to Darwinism – to ...”

“... elites’. In National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy (2018), Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell describe Viktor Orbán’s conspiracy theory about ‘billionaire Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros’ seeking to flood Christian Europe with Muslim refugees ‘to create a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism’ as ‘not ...”

“... exhibition, hoards and weapons: axes, spearheads, swords and shields, helmets and ring mail. The smith clearly took as much pride in his work as the carpenter. The Vale of York hoard, which dates from the 920s, contains silver coins, a Frankish liturgical cup, arm rings and what’s called ‘hack silver’. Sunhild Kleingärtner and Gareth Williams ...”

“... ambiguity as well as ambition, with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in ...”

“... out, claimed to be an exercise in what today is called judicial ‘originalism’. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s infamous pronouncement in Dred Scott that Black persons had ‘no rights which the white man is bound to respect’ purported to reflect the founders’ racial views at the time the Constitution was written.White Southerners’ efforts to ...”

“... meet in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Clive, prone to rashness and played with immense energy by Roger Livesey, is a version of Powell. Theo, reserved and considered, represents an idealised alter ego of Pressburger, who gave him the eloquence and insight Clive lacks. Taken prisoner in England during the First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the ...”