“... the person who understands politics is not Burke, who is for Wills just one more theorist, but Sir Robert Peel. So now the true conservatives are, on Wills’s view, not the theorists of the National Review, but those who settle for less and accept the system. It is Bagehot whom Wills quotes with most approval. What is mistaken in all this? It is significant ...”

“... when the orthodox refuted and denounced them. Only in the present generation have historians like Robert Mandrou and Peter Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another. Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, lived from 1532 ...”

“... of Keynes’s birth in 1883 has come and gone. Last year saw the opportune publication of Robert Skidelsky’s much-heralded new biography – or at least of its first volume, which does not get further than 1920. It is a formidable work, designed to out-Harrod Harrod, which will be an unparalleled source for those interested in the rise of the junior ...”

“... a Kessing’s Archive entry: ‘it inflicted disaster and destruction on the city,’ we are told. Robert McCrum’s first thriller was unusually well received. Follow-ups are notoriously hazardous, but he will not lose many readers with this second effort. The hero of A Loss of Heart is a 30-year-old Polytechnic lecturer. (McCrum, like Ackroyd, has an Auberon ...”

“... no British novels that, like Catch 22, approach war as lunacy made real, or implicitly ask, like Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, why running dope is worse than killing unarmed Vietnamese. Such a mixture of the macabre and the grotesque with a touch of anarchy is not a British vein. There are extraordinary figures in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... of arms to the Iranians from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew of the diversion of funds from the ...”

“... the ‘last outburst of peasant rage to result in murder’. The Village of Cannibals, like Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre, confirms the degree to which social historians, building on the Annales tradition, have embraced cultural anthropology and the study of popular political language over time. Darnton calls it ‘history in the ethnographic ...”

“... through Perec, Mann, Proust and Flaubert, he homes in on the figures of Carlo Emilio Gadda and Robert Musil, two ‘engineer-writers’ who have one quality in common: ‘their inability to find an ending’. Despite his own love of arcana and encyclopedic forms, Calvino’s relationship to this tradition was always tangential, for the simple reason ...”

“... documents from the very end of the tsarist period which tells the story of Nicholas’s last days. Robert Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter tells what happened to the Romanovs after they died. Massie’s book is a movie, big on atmosphere and set pieces, while Steinberg and Khrustalev’s book is a book, as dense with information as an old ...”

“... two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English ...”

“... of the administrative and political efficiency of their respective states. The work of Winter, Robert and their collaborators examines how they dealt with the problems of employment, welfare, food and fuel supply, housing and public health, in an effort to estimate the degree of satisfaction which they were able to maintain among their ...”

“... consisted of one chief clerk, seven subordinate clerks and a messenger. The US minister to France, Robert Livingston, had no staff.When Trump moves into the White House on 20 January, he will take charge of around 2.8 million non-military federal employees working in hundreds of departments and agencies sprawled throughout the Beltway and beyond. Trump gets to ...”

“... round … wears boots of Spanish leather, laced or tied along the side with black ribbons’. That Robert Hooke is ‘melancholy and giddy … and … has strange dreams of riding and eating cream’. That Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, with her lovers, peered through a ‘vidette’ or peephole to gaze on mating horses at Wilton House. That William Harvey ...”

“... cleansing’, with its suggestion that nothing more than a routine housekeeping task is involved. Robert Bevan begins his book with an account of his childhood obsession with photographs and film footage of the destruction of Europe’s built heritage in World War Two, an obsession that ‘felt wrong’ in relation to the ‘greater evil’ also available for ...”

“... nibbled at by the sharp tooth of development. But it still just about holds. In Sprawl, Robert Bruegmann bids those of us who cherish the division between city and countryside to take stock and review our values. Everywhere, the arbitrary containment of communities is dead or dying, he argues. Where it is maintained, it is only at a cost and by a ...”