“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... deadpan account of the tracking and capture of Eichmann in The House on Garibaldi Street; Richard Deacon, The Israeli Secret Service, which tells the story, among others, of Wolfgang Lotz, the Israeli spy with unassailably Aryan looks who infiltrated Egyptian government circles to get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story ...”

“... But above all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was ...”

“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... It lovingly describes how to plant, tend and ultimately harvest all kinds of tree, from the solid English oak to the Frenchified acacia with roots ‘which insinuate and run like loquorize under ground’. In his gardens at Sayes Court, on the edge of the naval dockyards at Deptford, he laid out complex arrangements of the most exotic trees and plants. Like ...”

“... to attend its weekly lectures. Such amateur societies were the main forum for the study of English poetry (the academic discipline of literature still confined itself to the ancient Greeks and Romans). But it also provided its members with something else: a chance to own reprints of Shelley’s more obscure and early writings.Wise took charge of ...”

“... impossible to deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This excessively ‘negative’ view, Knausgaard suggests, is not just ...”

“... d’histoire naturelle by the National Convention, the constituent assembly of the new republic. Richard Burkhardt’s Leopard in the Garden is a detailed account of the first 45 years of this furiously modernising institution, charting its successes and setbacks, noble ideals and unintended outcomes. At more than seven hundred pages long, it’s hard not to ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... Of all the great English poets, Dryden must be the least enjoyed. Once honoured ‘rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors ...”

“... has been the dark period of the Church of England: the middle ground lost between books on the English Revolution and the Elizabethan Church on the one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is ...”

“... France displayed a more radical profile than Tory England, and a polity more attractive to the English liberal Whig than Catholic, Inquisitorial Spain and Portugal. Decidedly a liberal Whig, Byron abstains pointedly from cheering on the war effort. He denounces our Portuguese allies as cowardly and murderous, and sees the Spanish resistance as compromised ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such as von Klenze’s Walhalla high above the Danube. There was no Arc de Triomphe, no Lincoln Memorial. Calton Hill possesses a hallucinatory grandeur, but Scotland was not a model for the War ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”