“... when a Scots Guards platoon executed 24 perfectly harmless Chinese plantation workers. Instead, Christopher Hale – a journalist with long experience reporting from Germany and South-East Asia – has put together a massive history of the British presence on the Malay peninsula. He tries to explain the outbreak of the jungle guerrilla war which began in ...”

“... opposed to it: Rome was after all known as the eternal city. But in Apocalypse and Golden Age, Christopher Star argues that Greeks and Romans were, in fact, pioneering and often deeply pessimistic thinkers about the long-term future of humanity. In contrast to Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts, they do not often imagine the survival of humanity, much ...”

“... Christopher Lasch, who died last year, has been rather undernoticed in Britain. His attention was admittedly focused on American politics and political thinking, but his fears and anxieties translate readily enough to a Britain showing many of the same symptoms of social and political disaffection, while his politics and his polemical style were those of an urbanised Cobbett – radical, popular, egalitarian and quite unplaceable on a left-right spectrum ...”

“... this what she has done upon very few other occasions. She realised in some measure the extravagant hope of her votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home empty-handed. These differences inevitably determined the kinds of settlement that evolved in the New World. The ...”

“... primitive. (For good practical reasons, primitive man was rather fond of offal.) Perhaps there is hope, though – for gastronomic taboos, like sexual ones, are curiously unstable between generations, and sometimes even within the same generation. Sir Walter Scott’s aged aunt was ashamed to read, even in private, the novels of Aphra Behn which she had heard ...”

“... reaction wasn’t, “It’s been very nice to have you, Joe. Great thing for me. Do hope you’ll come again.” Instead, I got a muttered speech ...’ But perhaps it was Sassoon who was the honest one. Perhaps it had not been very nice to have Joe for a fortnight. Anyway it is not honest of Ackerley to avert his eyes from his own knowledge ...”

“... less discriminating. A forthcoming book by my learned friend Ellen Ladowsky will, or so I vainly hope, assist in performing the vital office of incense-dispelling. She rather confirms Vidal’s judgment that Jackie might have married for any combination of reasons, but that cold cash would always be one of them. Learning of her rage and discontent at her ...”

“... like a genuine National Socialism, and that therefore the only course open was to pin one’s hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and ...”

“... quadcopters may soon drop off your groceries before you even know you need them. But, if you read Christopher Coker’s Future War (Polity, £16.99), this is the least of it. (He has a helpful foreword by General H.R. McMaster, deputy commanding general at the Futures Division of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.) There is other stuff on the ...”

“... were notices, berms, watchtowers. These were then blown up, bullet-holed, graffitied. ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ ‘Up the Provos!’ ‘Come back soon.’ ‘Stiff Little Fingers’ – with ‘Fingers’ crossed out and ‘Provos’ in its place. We had cousins in Keady, cousins near the Moy, family and ‘home places’ deep in Armagh’s ...”

“... behaviour often hovered dangerously close to being that of a paedophile,’ snorted Christopher Hart on the day Brian Gilbert’s movie Wilde was released). Julia Prewitt Brown sees him as a philosophical heavyweight; and celebrates his ‘dodginess’ in order to instal him in a post-dualist tradition of aesthetic theory – a missing link ...”

“... bloody crossroads’ where they have so often met, can disown a debt to the Cruiser. I hope that this is enough by way of sorrow and sincerity, though I could certainly have amplified it. Because the plain fact is that his latest book is a disgrace. Even if it doesn’t make one angry, it is a cause for disgust and depression. It fouls his ...”

“... was watched by 500 million people worldwide. Now there is The Golden Throne, the second volume in Christopher de Bellaigue’s novelesque historical trilogy about his life.The book is a carnival of depravity in five acts. We meet enslaved Christians, deceitful pirates, conniving concubines and red-faced viziers. There are spectacular battles and ad-hoc ...”

“... the Bauhaus had come under threat from the Nazis, who saw it as degenerate and subversive. In the hope of saving it, Mies moved the school to an old telephone factory in Berlin. But in 1933, when the Nazis suspected its printing presses were being used to produce anti-fascist propaganda, soldiers forcibly closed it down. The Gestapo told Mies he could reopen ...”

“... that’s because, Jardine says, ‘there is no end to where cats might not pop up.’ Jardine’s hope is that the book will, ‘in some measure, fill the gap of Muriel’s unwritten memoirs’, meaning the book Spark meant to write as a follow-up to Curriculum Vitae (1992), a scrupulously impersonal autobiography which took the story up to 1957. Finishing ...”