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“... prior to Stalin’s launching of the first Five-Year Plan in spring 1929. Her book is in every way fuller and more informative than Gray’s pioneering effort, being based not so much on the recollections of those who emigrated before 1923 as on unpublished material in Soviet public and private archives, of which no visiting scholar before her had made such ...”

“... subject and little understanding of the politics of the Labour Party. Robert Harris’s is longer, fuller and excellently researched: among the sources he has been able to see and uses very well are the GMC minutes of the Bedwellty Constituency Labour Party; he is thoroughly at home in Labour’s civil war and is able to chart Kinnock’s skilful course ...”

“... might serve as useful allies in the Crusades. This belief was reinforced by the legend of Prester John, which held that there was a powerful Christian monarch somewhere in the East, whose overriding ambition was to liberate the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels. Further support for the story came from a fictitious letter suggesting that a mysterious and ...”

“... and sculpture undermined art’s humanity. ‘Painting is made out of a love for the subject,’ John Minton repeatedly told his students at the Royal College of Art, in defiance of an abstract tradition that had resurfaced with Victor Pasmore’s 1948 abstracts. Pasmore became a leading member of the Constructionists: abstract artists who abandoned nature ...”

“... book in recent memory expressly to demand recognition for Kingsley Amis as a moralist; the other, John McDermott’s, is actually called Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. McDermott says ‘moralist’ clearly and right away, whereas Salwak’s subtitle sounds like one of Amis’s phonetic reports on the way a drunken man might have struggled to get the word ...”

“... a different future, there is no dearth of attempts to do so in the recent anthologies edited by John Carey and Catriona Kelly. Like all such collections of snippets from a wide variety of sources, they inevitably reflect their editors’ predilections rather than a canonical list of candidates for inclusion. The Kelly anthology, in fact, is more a grab-bag ...”

“... that considers the stock repertoire of the age. Even on apparently common ground, Price is often fuller in discussion: he tells us more about Garrick than does Nicoll, who uses the actor to operate as a benign presence rather than a biographic agent. Price is a little more informative on costume, too: Nicoll concentrates largely on questions of period ...”

“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the novel its title, the name of the ...”

“... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...”

“... disconcerted by such friends as Paul Johnson, who believes he would now be a strong Thatcherite, John Wain, who invokes Orwell as an opponent of Arthur Scargill, or in America Norman Podhoretz, who feels sure he would be taking his stand with the ‘neo-conservatives against the Left’. The New York Tribune, Rodden notes, went further and called Orwell the ...”

“... a strange streak of selfish cruelty running through him. It is unlikely that there can now be a fuller or more factual life of Collins than Clarke has given us. But it remains a short book, as authoritative biographies go. Its shortness is partly explained by the author’s professional deference in never trying his hand at literary criticism. It would be ...”

“... the task of evaluating these to other historians. But the result is that we have a considerably fuller account of how the Communist Party functioned between 1933 and 1937 than we have of the Purges themselves. The former and the latter may have been causally linked, as Getty argues they were, but it cannot be said that he has demonstrated this beyond any ...”

“... his likely behaviour in office. The biographies by Medvedev and Steele and Abraham provide a much fuller picture of the man. It is interesting that until his appointment as head of the KGB in 1967, Andropov had tended to be associated with the more reformist wing of the Soviet establishment. The young Andropov was a protégé of Otto Kuusinen, one of the more ...”

“... must not be critical, not because a lecture-length piece does not afford enough time to offer a fuller account, but because to do so it would be necessary to switch genres, and to start writing a critical essay. If a work of fiction achieved an effect of continual suspense by a similar refusal to fulfil the promises it made, I would no doubt be ...”

“... less exclusive; none has stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its doors wider, with a fuller confidence that it could make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom; and in no language has this confidence been more fully justified by the result.’ Shame and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English ...”