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“... to be seen as a watershed. With the Cold War over and the Gulf War won, President George Bush and James Baker, his Secretary of State, have adopted an attitude which the Israelis find so alarmingly even-handed that they have begun to suspect another sort of conspiracy, this time concocted by pro-Arab Texas oilmen. Bush says in private that there is not much ...”

“... are minor touches in this movie, as in its sequel Bride of Frankenstein, both of them directed by James Whale, which are just mysterious. Why is Frankenstein, called Victor in most versions of this story, including Mary Shelley’s, here called Henry? Why is his friend called Victor? The bereaved father of the little girl ...”

“... match between subject and author make the series distinctive. The ‘concept’, as its editor James Atlas explained to me a few years ago, is to produce books that airline passengers can read on a flight from New York to San Francisco and finish before they reach the Golden Gate. Given the entertainment options available at 35,000 feet this is not an ...”

“... Rebel and High Tory at the same time’, and elected as his role model his mother’s uncle, Sir Henry Hoyle Howorth MP FRS, who published a five-volume History of the Mongols but was notable chiefly as a maverick. ‘He refused to believe in ice ages long after everyone took them for granted,’ Leach once told me proudly. ‘In politics, when an MP, he ...”

“... milieu, in which the unshockable ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’ would have been the norm. Henry James’s biography (briefly mentioned here) of the sculptor William Wetmore Story recalls with wonderful wry nostalgia those expatriate Italian circles of the 1850s, ‘that strange sisterhood’ of American ‘lady sculptors’ and ‘the queer ...”

“... you thought were dead, and the first published photo of Lawrence’s supposed lover, William Henry Hocking. This is surely the most readable, judicious and authoritative scholarly biography of Lawrence yet written. Yet it also presses hard against the limitations of its single-volume narrative format. By embracing Jessie Chambers’s formula that ‘life ...”

“... is Macaulay, whose brilliant narratives are freer than most of blindness to the Celts. But Henry Hallam, F.W. Maitland and, above all, William Stubbs are presented as the high priests of inveterate Englishism. ‘Despite their immense erudition and their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic ...”

“... hardened up what seems to have been hours of musing with Ranson into unfairly selected quotes. In Henry V when the messenger enters and tells the Lord Constable, ‘The English lie within 1500 paces of your tents,’ he asks: ‘Who hath measured the ground?’ The notorious problem with forensic evidence, cold on the page or presented to a jury, is that it ...”

“... flight from the city itself, along with what Defoe might have learned subsequently from his uncle Henry (who remained in London and shares the initials of Defoe’s narrator), compensates for this. Gilman is a superb close reader, which goes a long way to redeeming an often tendentious book. Gilman is at his most persuasive in a powerful reading of Jonson’s ...”

“... from limewood by Grinling Gibbons, which he sometimes wore to answer the door, and a clock that Henry VIII had given to Anne Boleyn. His house was open to visitors if they applied for tickets and Walpole would show them round himself. What it all meant, however, was less easy to see. ‘Horrie’ was described by one of his many detractors as a man who wore ...”

“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... Presbyterian goals, a tenet that has endured, with a more secular inflection, as Graham Walker and James Greer recognise, in Ulster Protestantism’s contractarian – and seemingly casual – commitment to the rule of law. The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the ...”

“... Auden always in some sense stayed at home: a friend he met after his translation to America, James Stern, later described him as ‘the most unalterably English, the most unlikely expatriate’, and Nicholas Nabokov similarly spoke with affection of Auden’s ‘clumsy laughter, his assertive way of telling not quite exportable (English ...”

“... will appear in the autumn, along with the collected works of Jefferson in one volume, one of four Henry Adams volumes, and one of four Emersons. James will fill eight volumes, and the first, soon to appear, includes Watch and Ward and four other early works. His critical writing will occupy two volumes, which will be not ...”

“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”