“... scholarship and even less in the way of serious scholarly argument. There are, however, two major issues that have produced both: the origins of the Cold War and the Eisenhower presidency – issues that have been the subject of extensive literature and extensive controversy and for which there are now not only well-established orthodox views but ...”

“... Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense ...”

“... of his father, and for a long time relied on marginal posts (such as the Stewardship of St John’s College) in order not to have to seek employment outside the University.’ Something has gone severely wrong here: it was the father, W.H. Bateson, who never held a University teaching post, and whose one-year stint as Vice-Chancellor occurred in an age ...”

“... of atavistic self-assertion to proclaim national identity: a sub-Churchillian declension from the major fiasco that was Suez to the folly of the Falklands and thence via football-led xenophobia to mindless slogans in defence of a patriotic pound. Above all, appeasement, which the historical Churchill had the good sense to recognise as sensible politics in ...”

“... French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre. Major works (by Titian, Raphael and probably Van Eyck, as well as by Spanish artists) which had been illegally removed and found their way into private collections in London or Paris were not returned. And Marshal Soult was allowed to keep his many artistic ...”

“... that the wonderful vision contained in the Book of Revelation was not written by a man named John (even if he was a different John from the Gospel-writer or the author of three Epistles). The book known as Acts of the Apostles claims to be by the same author as Luke’s Gospel, but this is a vexed issue Ehrman chooses ...”

“... twenty years, and while he’s still far from being a fixture of concert programmes, most of his major works have been recorded, often to favourable reviews.Jeremy Dibble is an admirer. Delius’s music was the soundtrack to his teenage years; he was drawn to its ‘lyricism and poetry’. His book focuses on Delius’s compositional processes. ‘We can ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... mechanism for coping with surplus fertility? The ancient and long-successful answer, suggests John Boswell, is abandonment: handing your child over to The Kindness of Strangers. What Boswell starts from is some well-known stories, those of Oedipus, of Romulus and Remus, of Paris, Perdita, or Moses in the bulrushes. The child cannot or must not be kept but ...”

“... consent. Robinson had been ready to be a ‘persuader’ within the Unionist community, but when Major had shown the DUP his door, he could, he said, ‘have wept that the prime minister of the United Kingdom could behave in such a childish way’. ‘I’m interested that you talk in terms of crying. Isn’t part of your problem that public opinion on the ...”

“... fragment’, as another character observes) is this rich and dense account of a life rendered. As John Bainbridge sifts through his rag-bag of memories, we close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an ...”

“... 23 months, yet in March when the tremendous blow strikes, the news that somehow or other, while in John Stuart Mill’s care, his just finished first volume, which pleased him ‘better than anything’ he had ever done, had been used as kindling, he and Jane respond without bitterness and with total courage to the emergency. As Carlyle sets out to write a new ...”

“... the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John Singer Sargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant crowd-dazzler and populariser; like Sargent, he is unadventurous in his choice of precedents; like Sargent, a dashing but flattering ...”

“... Kipling, a bit of a road-hog who had the nerve to proclaim that the car had at last brought a major blood sport to Britain. His fellow poet and road-hog, John Masefield, also exulted as he traversed the Downs at furious speed, his Overland emitting ‘soul-animating strains’ (doubtless from a Gabriel horn). And the ...”

“... and politics. Nicolson is equally disapproving of Virginia Woolf’s treatment of the other major theme of Three Guineas, war and the causes of war, a theme which was to her a kind of posthumous discussion with Julian Bell about his decision to go to Spain. She suspected his motives and could not find them altogether admirable. Nicolson’s verdict is ...”