“... dictated French foreign policy, while also finding time to shape political opinion. He was a major investor in the Courier de l’Europe, a periodical which reported House of Commons debates and informed Europe about Britain’s war thinking. This alarmed His Majesty’s Government but delighted Vergennes, who learned more from reading it than he did ...”

“... volumes have ample but not crushingly exhaustive footnotage, with maps, a glossary, a list of the major personages who enter Pepys’s life, and relatively few (but always apposite) illustrations. One gets to live with the conventions almost as an extension of the diarist’s obsessive personality. The information is dispersed in a Pepysian pattern: there is ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... Civil War, mostly a much more accessible work, assumes that its readers will find the MP Sir John Culpepper’s remarks on monopolies in November 1640 ‘too well known to need quoting’. Any prospect of a rounded or balanced discussion of the ‘fall of the British monarchies’ is jettisoned by the decision to omit themes which have been or are being ...”

“... the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John Conolly, to institute a system of humanitarian care for their patients. After these early steps away from the cruel and barbarous treatment of the mad of the preceding centuries, the medical profession began the process of putting the treatment of the mental ...”

“... about what he wrote; this one is principally about what he did.’ Foster has had the benefit of John Kelly’s magnificent, though all too slowly emerging, edition of the correspondence, and has himself done herculean work in the archives. Among his chief sources is of course Yeats’s own ‘disingenuous’ prose masterpiece, the Autobiographies. For this ...”

“... think in the exhibition of architects’ drawings from the Barbara Pine collection, at Sir John Soane’s Museum until 27 August. The most interesting and liveliest are sketches which take you close to the moment of invention. These, like the material at Tate Modern, are early moves, unresolved and sometimes tentative. Frank Gehry’s 1982 ‘Study for ...”

“... that he might show signs of having been influenced by the Fugitives; indeed, the shades of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate seem to hover around many of the earlier poems in this volume, poems with titles like ‘Ladies by Their Windows’, ‘Landscape with Little Figures’, ‘Beyond the Hunting Woods’, ‘On the Death of Friends in ...”

“... image of the lyrical libertine who underwent a spectacular deathbed conversion has obscured a major poetic talent. Not that the old picture was wrong, but it was partial. The trouble has been that it is hard to fit his philosophical and religious beliefs, poetic practice and dissolute life into a whole. His death in 1680 seemed so aptly emblematic of the ...”

“... in Who do you think you are?), humorous essays, television plays. His TV adaptation of the John Fowles short story, ‘The Enigma’, was extremely skilful. To the general public he is probably best-known by virtue of the BBC serialisation of The History Man. This caused something of a stir a few years back, partly due to the excellence of the book ...”

“... intertwined. Given a childhood home in Hartshorn Lane, Westminster, later to become one of the major sewage canals in London, and a family dependent on a kitchen garden abutting the sewage ditch, it begins to seem sustainable – almost suppositional – that ‘inserted into the metaphorical anus of greater London, Jonson begins his life by eating ...”

“... standards for history education, drawn up with the participation of hundreds of scholars and every major professional association of history teachers. Lynn Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has condemned the plan because, among other things, George Washington is mentioned less frequently than Harriet Tubman, who led groups of ...”

“... paying out when the insured-against event happens. Just ask anyone who has had a property suffer a major mishap. It’s worth saying ‘Don’t be evil,’ because lots of businesses are. This is especially an issue in the world of the internet. Internet companies are working in a field that is poorly understood (if understood at all) by customers and ...”

“... is business. But it is disconcerting if not appalling to learn that throughout the 1930s, some major Hollywood studios, despite being heavily populated by Jews and popularly identified with them, continued to distribute their movies in Germany and even pandered to the Nazi regime. Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler and Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration ...”

“... that the wave of witchcraft prosecutions in Europe marks the Continent’s narrow avoidance of a major Malthusian crisis, and it seems to be true that witchcraft prosecutions accompany a rapid rise in population, and that cases often involve the refusal to give food. It is surely not fanciful to hear the resentment of the hungry for the well-fed behind the ...”