“... in 1399. There he contrasted the ‘boy’, Richard, with his supplanter, the ‘man’, Henry IV. He also elaborated on the childlike characteristics that rendered Richard unfit to be king: he was untruthful, wilful and understood only his own pleasure. Arundel was not suggesting that Richard was still a child in terms of mental capacity. Rather, he ...”

“... were respected. Not so the visitors who paid to see them. First Coleridge and the Romantics, then Henry James and Virginia Woolf, then the New Critics of the 1930s, followed by Barthes, Derrida and the deconstructionists, have scolded literary tourists. ‘The author’s dead!’ they’ve told these vagrant supplicants again and again. ‘So go home, sit ...”

“... opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... straight through can pick up what happened ante for himself (who is going to forget the death of Henry Thrale?), while the reader who is trying to look something up will be helped just as much by a sufficient index. There is much more that we would wish to know than is offered by the notes. For instance, in Volume I the only note on John Taylor, Johnson’s ...”

“... American journalism’, is a lengthy and anecdotal analysis of the transactions between political power in the United States during the last fifty years and the power of the mass media. The latter are exemplified for Halberstam by four conglomerates of the American communications industry, each more or less in the control ...”

“... Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in the process of covering his tracks, consolidating and extending his power and justifying his original ...”

“... are familiar with this sort of retrospective chronicling. Putin’s treatise looks very like Henry VIII’s justification for invading a sovereign, neighbouring state in his Declaration, containing the just causes and considerations of this present war with the Scots (1542). The medieval legends and hints of trinitarian theology in Putin’s narrative ...”

“... The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly perpetual corporations; but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire ...”

“... knowing pundits warned that this was where the First World War had started. It was left to Henry Kissinger to point out that that conflict had begun precisely because of foreign intervention. This, too, was only a partial account. Kissinger failed to mention the importance of a highly mobilised military, and a loose interpretation of the right to use ...”

“... are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to become a greengrocer. The books aren’t proof that he wasn’t stupid; but they are proof that he was dogged and canny, with a strange and lurid imagination. Haggard’s father ...”

“... in most parts of the former Carolingian world, and had devolved onto lords whose dynastic power was increasingly local, Bisson sets out to explain how it was that public political institutions, of a largely new kind, had emerged by 1215. That year marks the end of his ‘long’ century, which starts c.1050. His survey deals with all of Western ...”

“... the last sung service of the Benedictine monks, which closed their life at Durham in the time of Henry VIII, on 31 December 1539. This is where Moorhouse starts, in a study of Durham that is more than just a study of Durham, and which is enriched by his usual stylish prose and eye for detail. The book would be a good place to begin if one wanted to ...”

“... principles and values, and that it did not have a cat in hell’s chance of achieving national power.’ Nonetheless, his idealism in other areas seems to have survived. Among the more revealing passages in this not particularly revealing book are those in which the author describes his schooldays, which was when he absorbed (from his headmaster) ‘a ...”

“... between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for the place of honour. Between these three women enough power should have been generated even for an impossible cause. They were tireless collectors of facts – Rose used to take her newspaper-cuttings everywhere – and what courage they showed, what endurance, what determination to call the world sharply to ...”

“... Henry VIII’s jurisidictional quarrel with the Papacy was not resolved, and its consequences are with us still. In Henry’s eyes the dispute was one of authority, not doctrine, but doctrinal questions soon became involved. His quarrel coincided with religious ferment on the Continent and with the emergence of religious diversity in England, as the religious teachings of Luther and Zwingli spread in the late 1520s and early 1530s ...”