“... James, however, they do represent one of the contexts in which he started writing, a context that John Sutherland describes as being ‘interestingly Jamesian’. Besides, searching out unattributed work by major writers is a much more worthwhile enterprise than claiming, like Mr Mybug in Cold Comfort Farm, that Branwell ...”

“... to 1970s Bethnal Green.Much of Chaimowicz’s work is pale and delicately outlined, but his first major piece glitters away in the near dark. Celebration? Realife, which occupies the first room at Wiels, was first shown at the Gallery House in London in 1972. (Chaimowicz lived at the gallery during the run and would invite visitors to join him for coffee ...”

“... and in 1861 Fontainebleau was extended and decreed ‘une réserve artistique’. It was a major influence on the designation of national parks in the US – Americans were among the main collectors of the Barbizon School – beginning with the opening of Yellowstone in 1872.The exhibition curators praise the harmony that Rousseau creates between the ...”

“... distribution. Today the continuing attraction of many of these to the Soviet people is seen as a major barrier to reform. At the same time, the merciless light which glasnost has encouraged Soviet commentators to shine on their own society has given rise to a vast literature of horrors: descriptions of social and medical care which, at best, reaches the ...”

“... and pugnacious as dogs.’ In the same year, Agatha Christie published The Sittaford Mystery (Major Burnaby cheated at the séance!), Margery Allingham published Police at the Funeral (cluster of unexplained deaths in Socrates Close, Cambridge!) and Dorothy Sayers published The Five Red Herrings (Lord Peter Wimsey was the only one to spot the missing tube ...”

“... Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ancient sources. Its philosophical base was Neoplatonic and ...”

“... John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending him a copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed it to ‘Oxford’s only civilising influence’. To those who, in 1931, goggled and giggled at his innkeeping confessions, Fothergill was the contumacious dandy for ever locked in combat with ‘clients’ who fell short of his standards, a man prepared to track down and rebuke a brigadier-general who, with his wife, dropped in to the Spreadeagle to use the lavatory without a please or thank you ...”

“... Here, at last, was an elite worth joining.Klawans makes it clear that his approach to Sturges’s major films will ‘veer’ from ‘biographical-psychological’ interpretation. Instead he means to follow Stanley Cavell in demonstrating that these films, like many others produced in the studio era, ‘can be understood to unfold like reasoned arguments ...”

“... agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper ...”

“... Octagon Theatre. One chain of events focuses on the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, Mr John Stalker, who was recently suspended for three months during an internal disciplinary investigation and subsequently reinstated by the lay Police Authority, despite the evident willingness of his senior colleagues to have him face a tribunal. The other ...”

“... who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ticket Kennedy would not have been elected. Consequently, without Graham’s intervention there might never have been a Johnson ...”

“... hapless Labour Government could not be expected to have foreseen or averted, much less mastered. John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reached for a mechanical metaphor appropriate to the current state of the art. ‘We have magneto trouble,’ he wrote in December 1930. ‘How, then, can we start up again?’ Keynesian policies, at the time and ...”

“... On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere ...”

“... War movement was the same man who had, half a century before, hounded Emma Goldman and John Reed and, later, put Leon Trotsky under surveillance in Mexico. This longevity makes Hoover’s biography a wonderful subject. Powers’s book is painfully neutral and somewhat pedestrian at times, but his authoritative command of his sources makes it ...”

“... Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning history in favour of such invertebrate programmes of study as those which go under the name of ...”