“... streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps’. These struggles to accommodate what Henry James called ‘our crude and silent past, our garish climate, our deafening present’ to European traditions resulted in a realist tradition which may turn out to be America’s greatest contribution to 19th and 20th-century painting. Professor Novak’s book ...”

“... Westmacott’s statue of Francis, 5th Duke of Bedford still looks down Bedford Place at Charles James Fox (also by Westmacott). His hand rests on a plough; a sheep and a cherub laden with produce among his supporters record his interest in agricultural improvement. (Woburn Abbey, his country place, gives its name to local streets.) In the centre children ...”

“... way or cabbages spaced just so.Picture gardens tend to put painters off. In The Tragic Muse Henry James describes the reaction of a young painter called Nick Dormer to a garden of that sort. Nick feels himself ‘catch the smile’ of ‘named and numbered acres’. He appreciates that they have a ‘charm to which he had not perhaps hitherto done ...”

“... The fire station owes the preservation of its lettering to the vigilance of a printing historian, James Mosley, and an architectural historian, Andrew Saint; and to the fact that the building is still a fire station. When the clothing store Simpson of Piccadilly became a Waterstone’s bookshop a more painful battle of badges took place. Inside, mounted on an ...”

“... to answer the crucial question: did he fall or was he pushed? For illumination it helps to turn to Peter Taylor, an investigative journalist whose Panorama programme first told the public that the scene of one of the shootings had been bugged by MI5. Taylor’s painstakingly detailed analysis reveals that the concerns which finally led to the disciplinary ...”

“... in 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert ...”

“... and his religious opinions.’ Whether that applied to women as well is less easy to say. Nor does Peter Raby, in an admirably balanced and judicious biography, have much light to throw upon the question. However unusual he was as an individual, Butler belonged to a well-defined Victorian male grouping, whose representatives in literary terms would range from ...”

“... knowledge of, and evident affection for, Sayers’s fiction – the detective stories about Lord Peter Wimsey especially. And now, she comes forward with what will surely rank as the definitive biography of Sayers. It is not a book which contains any surprises for those of us who have read the previous biographies. Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather ...”

“... Ben Sanderson, played by Nicolas Cage, enters an exclusive Beverly Hills bar and approaches Peter Brackman, an agent he knows, to borrow a few dollars. Plainly worried about his reputation, Brackman gives Ben the money but adds: ‘I think it would be best if you didn’t contact me again.’ The reason Ben inspires such fear and hostility in his ...”

“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... work, taking precedence over the philosophical rulebooks and homilies favoured by Foucault and Peter Brown in their researches on sexuality. This deliberate prioritising of the erotic genre over the philosophical is celebrated by a striking image on the cover: Aristotle, on all fours, ridden by the hetaera Phyllis brandishing a whip. Considered morally ...”

“... a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor before, and this book came as something of a revelation. As a writer he has the gift, which seems both wholly natural and yet to go with a very conscious discipline and decorum, of putting the reader calmly inside his world in his first few ...”

“... though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the Great, and rose from servitude to become a general in the Army, responsible by the end of his career for all military engineering in Russia. Pushkin’s father belonged to a family that had distinguished itself in public affairs in the late 16th ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... of the Parliamentary party. Richard Kelly usefully distils his work on the party conference and James Kellas is able to deploy his wide knowledge of Scottish politics to chart the Conservatives’ failure north of the border. Richard Cockett draws on his earlier research on the party and the media in one essay, and on his recent book on right-wing ...”