“... a strange streak of selfish cruelty running through him. It is unlikely that there can now be a fuller or more factual life of Collins than Clarke has given us. But it remains a short book, as authoritative biographies go. Its shortness is partly explained by the author’s professional deference in never trying his hand at literary criticism. It would be ...”

“... the Oxford English Dictionary’s hundred most frequently cited authorities (one spot ahead of John Donne) for the earliest evidence of a word. He probably got this one from the German; it doesn’t seem to show up in French until 1820. Soon autobiography was everywhere, and not in a good way. Or so it seemed to the editors of the Quarterly Review, who, as ...”

“... John Jones, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford, has written a number of good, idiosyncratic books on topics as diverse as Greek tragedy and Wordsworth, together with an excellent novel, The Same God, published in 1972 and apparently without a successor. He has now produced a good, idiosyncratic book on Shakespeare ...”

“... I must not, I wish not to do.’ ‘The Italians,’ wrote the American journalist Margaret Fuller, to whom we owe one of the most evocative and insightful eyewitness accounts of the events in Rome, ‘deliver themselves, with all the vivacity of their temperament, to perpetual hurrahs, vivas, rockets and torchlit processions. I often think how grave ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... either scholarly – new material come to light – or critical: new slant on a known personality. John Bierman does have some fresh material. ‘New documentary sources,’ he writes, ‘include the hitherto unpublished expedition journals of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...”

“... The new select committee system was launched in 1979 with a characteristic flourish by Norman St John Stevas, then Leader of the House of Commons. MPs were ‘embarking upon a series of changes that could constitute the most important Parliamentary reforms of the century’. The proposals were ‘intended to redress the balance of power’ – as between Parliament and the executive – ‘to enable the House of Commons to do more efficiently the job it has been elected to do ...”

“... In​ 1607 John Derpier, an argumentative Wiltshire gentleman, was hauled before an ecclesiastical court for publicly proclaiming ‘the most hereticall & damnable opinion (that there was noe god & noe resurrection, & that men died a death like beastes)’. Derpier’s audacity was compounded by the fact that he had made his assertion in a church and in the hearing of the impressionable youth of the parish ...”

“... lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you shrieking, Colonel?’ One hopes that he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of ...”

“... of dirtiness in the 19th century – and that despite the fact that, in the century before, John Wesley, not mentioned by Goubert, had preached – and was not alone in preaching – that cleanliness came after godliness. Wesley far more than any of his contemporaries also knew about ‘the internalising of standards’. The omission of Evangelical ...”

“... of the maimed Victorian sexual life – the disclosed private writings of Munby, Housman, John Addington Symonds and others – but we are strangely put off by the unseemly nakedness of their personal outpourings. The imagery they chose – their two ladybirds, each on the other side of the window, close, but unable to touch, the spectator consigned ...”

“... issue to be settled on non-controversial lines. This was a serious phase in his career, as John Grigg’s fine biography makes clear. It is certainly not enough to dismiss the 1910 coalition memorandum, as Mr Sykes does, as the product of ‘an attack of nerves’. From 1910 onwards, L.G. was to some degree an Empire man, if not protectionist. He was a ...”

“... pretty much the same as it did in 1957, when I visited it, curious about the subject on which John Davis has now given us a first-rate, concise and attractively written book. San Nicandro has made only two entrances onto the historical stage. It was an early centre of Italian socialism and agrarian struggle in the grain-fields of northern Apulia, whose ...”

“... The first recorded discovery of such an object occurred in June 1797 when the English antiquary John Frere caught sight of two marvellous examples deep in a hole dug by brick workers in Suffolk. Convinced that these were ‘weapons … used by a people who had not the use of metals’, Frere traced them to ‘a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of ...”