“... of political corruption and the concomitant weakness of historical approaches that sought to ‘read’ politics off social structure. His students took these lessons to heart, but he was moving in another direction. In the last decade, Stedman Jones has in essence become yet another Cambridge historian of political thought, concerned, especially in his ...”

“... to supply evidence on word usage, the thoroughness and accuracy with which these sources were read, and the use made by the lexicographers of the evidence which the source study provided. Unfortunately, it is surprisingly difficult for the average OED2 user to form an accurate opinion of any of these three factors. According to Brewer, ‘only one study ...”

“... he became senior prefect in his house. In 1941 he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, to read classics; he spent the last year of the war in the Intelligence Corps, working at the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi. A child of Empire, then, and beneficiary of all the privileges bestowed by an élite education; his family was wealthy, his mother a ...”

“... defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.’ For Boomers like me, treated to an endless cycle of these films on afternoon television in the 1960s and 1970s, they offered a wonderful cinematic ...”

“... first approached in July 2010 by a correspondent who preferred to remain anonymous. He said he had read her work and wondered if she might be interested in looking at his collection of papyrus fragments, one of which pointed, as he put it, ‘towards a Gnostic gospel, in which Jesus and a disciple had an argument about Mary’. King, who had publicly suggested ...”

“... seal on Magna Carta and the supporting Charter of the Forests. Carpenter’s two volumes should be read in conjunction with his magisterial edition of Magna Carta for Penguin Classics.*In return, Parliament granted the king the last great tax he was to receive for thirty years. It was Henry’s doing that Parliaments increasingly met at his preferred residence ...”

“... of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates uncompromisingly on the bones, and attempts to read the society exclusively through them. For reasons that remain obscure, the social system based in the Chaco Canyon came to a sudden end. Sometime around 1150 AD, the inhabitants of the Great Houses appear to have abandoned them, leaving behind granaries full ...”

“... alone.’Yet Church was right: Elsie was central to Stevens’s poethood, although she refused to read his later poetry and resented his literary success. As part of his five-year courtship of her he composed a pair of 20-poem sequences, ‘Book of Verses’, which he presented to her on her 22nd birthday in 1908, and ‘The Little June Book’, given the ...”

“... since gone broke and were at the point of extinction. Those stuffy apartments came to mind as I read about Cavafy’s home in the old Greek quarter in Alexandria, crowded with his mother’s furniture. On the lower floor was a brothel, one of the many on his street, with a church and a hospital also nearby. One can imagine him sitting late into the night in ...”

“... man’s widow. The significant thing, though, is that Marrot’s generation (his book was widely read and instantly reprinted) retained a faith in the writer not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could ...”

“... have only arrived at page 3 (large print and two photographs of the young Diana on page 2) when we read: During the day Patrick went to a crèche, at night he was left alone. Sometimes after leaving the coffee bar where I worked I went out dancing. Then Patrick got measles and I had to stop work. The money ran out and I sent Patrick, now two, to live with my ...”

“... effects of policy-wonking on circulation. He became a management consultant, author and adviser to Peter Mandelson. Living on Thin Air is, for the most part, a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the ...”

“... For many years​ I held certain assumptions about Larry McMurtry. Without ever having read his novels, I thought of him as a prolific – perhaps excessively prolific – author of sentimental bestsellers, most of them sequels or prequels to earlier successes. I knew that a few good movies had been adapted from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited ...”

“... she was also put in the lowest grade, in her case 1G. Our parents were working-class and when I read in Todd’s book that ‘working-class children were likely to find themselves relegated to the lowest streams of grammar schools, regardless of their eleven-plus results,’ I was naturally disposed to agree. Then again, what evidence was there that my ...”

“... Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavour which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its ...”