“... people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of Aristocracy, show that, for all his gifts, he would not be a front-runner for the editorship of Country Life. Few historians bring more energy and relish to chronicling the shortcomings of titled or famous ...”

“... fail to maintain her pretence of leadership. Neil Kinnock may, despite himself, take over. David Owen may come out of his increasingly conservative camouflage to capture that middle ground on which success in British politics has been said, with decreasing plausibility, to rest. None, however, has a politically able team behind them. Almost anything ...”

“... second volume of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan, excellently and informatively edited by David Daniell. In Buchan’s social outlook there is a strong ‘zoological’ streak (somewhat recalling Kipling). It is strong in The Half-Hearted, which I happen to have been rereading. People in this novel belong to ‘kinds’. Lewis Haytoun, when unhappy ...”

“... The title of David Abulafia’s magisterial book comes, as he reminds us, from a Hebrew blessing, to be recited when setting eyes on the Mediterranean: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea.’ His book is a two-fold history: first of the trade and the traders who discovered the sea, created its ports and never ceased thereafter to animate it in pursuit of commerce ...”

“... in anything approaching a full way. The Times gave it modest coverage, both through the columns of David Wood and through its reports of debates in the plenary sessions. For all practical purposes, the rest was silence.’ Something resembling silence also greeted the European Elections of 1979. These not only produced the present combative European ...”

“... being flown over to France to DJ in clubs in Paris and Lyon, but, despite my best endeavours, the French seemed largely unreceptive. Two or three years later, they finally caught on. The young man who had lost ten thousand francs organising the first (lacklustre) rave in Lyon launched a series of techno compilation CDs. The first sold over 150,000 ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... shows, too, how technically difficult printing forced printer-publishers to look overseas. The French were better at printing in red and black, and so two-colour liturgical books were often imported from abroad. The greatness of the Great Bible (1538) was in part a product of its physical heft: printed on large demy paper, an unbound copy was ‘more than ...”

“... undergoing the fate of Canaan long ago and Palestine today. In a different spirit the 19th-century French socialist writer Pierre Leroux learned Hebrew in order to translate, or rather adapt in a dramatic form, the Book of Job, as a lesson on ‘the resurrection and perfectibility of Mankind’. About the same time there was a mass arrest of Jews in Damascus ...”

“... Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it was to be alive. Margaret Mount Cashell was filled to the brim with republican sympathies, inspired by her former ...”

“... her veil, Loti had not twigged that one of his principal sources for the details of harem life was French, a turcophile like him, and herself a writer – she had produced her own account of life in the women’s quarters, Le Jardin fermé, in 1908. She and her two Turkish friends began their games with Loti idly, but, she maintained, became serious when they ...”

“... therefore rather like summarising a department store during the winter sales. It contains British, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian and American writers. It parades other ranks, NCOs and officers of various grades in the army of history (some of the latter claiming honorary guerrilla status). There are papers, ranging from the fairly concise to the ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... ecological credentials, which anticipate those of another wilderness-loving loner, Henry David Thoreau, Natty is also, as the book’s final words put it, ‘the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within hours of ...”