“... returned with a vengeance in 1942, as Graham Smith unsparingly describes in When Jim Crow met John Bull. The British Cabinet groaned at the prospect of an invasion of black troops. Anthony Eden wanted them sent elsewhere and claimed they would be unable to withstand the British weather. It was important not to upset America, but equally important not to ...”

“... so passed, in this city of sinister charm (once described by Gore Vidal as ‘the Vatican of the John Birch Society’), in an agony of boredom and irrelevance. And then the ABC News Nightline team, the flagship of supposedly serious coverage, announced that it was vacating its skybox and leaving town. No story. Thus did the grand tradition of Convention ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... Michelangelo’s relations with patrons princely and papal, he works conscientiously through the major items of the oeuvre in more or less chronological order and, where art historians are not agreed on the chronology, painstakingly reports their different views: ‘Gould (1974) ... proposes that the panel was painted ... in two periods ... Levey ...”

“... of his conviction that ‘what was really at stake’ was power, not ideas, he chooses to ignore major currents of colonial thought. (It is certainly odd to encounter a book on the coming of the Revolution in which the words ‘liberalism’ and ‘republicanism’ do not appear in the index and the Country Party ideology is treated in a single ...”

“... Sexual Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay marriages being celebrated and blessed inside Christian churches, he made waves. It is not altogether obvious why the suggestion should be so shocking. Why is it ...”

“... and so does any theory you construct from it. In Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy opens up a startling new angle on certain secret operations of the mid-1580s. If he is right, he has blown an extraordinarily effective cover, which had everyone fooled at the time and has survived intact for four centuries. Some of the links in his ...”

“... a kinship with that Ezra Pound are likely to be ignored. This is the case with the American poet John Peck, who, now in his late fifties, with a massive and challenging achievement behind him and the devotion of an active British publisher, is unknown not only to general readers but to those who think they know about modern poetry. To be strictly ...”

“... There’s a revealing slip near the start of John Banville’s new novel. Ursula Godley, whose husband lies dying upstairs, reflects on her son and daughter: ‘These are the creatures she carried inside her and gave birth to and fed from her own breast, phoenix-like.’ A phoenix can never feed its young because there is only ever one of it at a time ...”

“... life followed the classic path of the modern politician: a member of the broad left; CND; the ‘major influence’ of the Communist Party; the constant struggle against the Trots; political networking; president of the National Union of Students; political adviser to Barbara Castle and then Peter Shore (there are shrewd portraits of both); local government ...”

“... as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in the affair. David Leigh of the Observer wrote on 6 January 1985, ‘The intercepted Argentine signals were decoded and telexed at the time directly to Navy HQ at ...”

“... Terry Eagleton argued that modern British culture had proved incapable of producing a major writer who could analyse society as a whole. It had collapsed into a ‘withered empiricism’. And English poetry in this century has seemed to many to confirm this analysis, the dominant voice being one of cautious ‘common sense’ tinged with a wistful ...”

“... of Commons have been used to rub off the glamour of three years ago. Even his wife, then seen as a major asset, is now apparently a witch whose dangerous influence equals Nancy Reagan’s with the President. But nothing has changed in three years to justify such a reassessment. It is the shallowness of much press comment and its inability to reach a balanced ...”

“... seven such classes, Halsey eight. Halsey’s eight classes are then further aggregated into three major social classes with a managerial/administrative ‘Service Class’ at the top (Classes I and II), an ‘Intermediate Class’ (Classes III, IV and V), which is not at all like the ‘middle class’ of colloquial usage, and a ‘Working Class’ (Classes ...”

“... years. When he died at last in 1868, the Daily Telegraph sounded a Last Post for ‘the old drum-major of the army of liberty’; and if there were other less generous memories, time had no doubt softened the bitterness which his by then distant political activities had so frequently generated. As with the white cobra in Kipling’s ‘The King’s ...”