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“... as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law ...”

“... more than a potted biography, fleshed out with some not very revealing ‘exclusive’ interviews. John Ardoin is the major authority on Callas, who in Callas (with Gerald Fitzgerald, Thames and Hudson, 1974) and The Callas Legacy (Duckworth, 1977), has forged the most detailed and balanced account and critique of her career ...”

“... For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance promises an occasion to assay the limits of the canon, for Butts’s second novel, Armed with Madness, first published in 1928, is, I would say, a masterpiece of Modernist prose ...”

“... museum was in a strategic area, with several ministries, the railway station, a bus station, and major street intersections. Troops in tanks not more than 50 metres from the museum entrance were asked by an employee to protect the institution, but said they didn’t have orders to do so. The looters finally left on 12 April, when the media showed up. A few ...”

“... With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre: Thomas Mann in the convoluted, partly essayistic prose of his novels, Bert Brecht in the drama and narrative poetry of social dialectics, Benn in the lyrical poetry of radical Modernism ...”

“... By Eng Lit I mean that puritan and parochial academic tradition of which Leavis was the major school marm. ‘When I am in London, I live effectively as an exile. As a radical intellectual, I am always on the margins, on the outside, looking in.’Peter Fuller wrote this in 1975. By the end, he had joined the club. At the time of his death in a road ...”

“... of ordinariness diverts any readers from the prose of the early 19th-century labourer-poet John Clare, as rooted a resident of his native Helpston in Northamptonshire as Turner was of East Hoathly in Sussex. Clare was not so sustained a diarist as Turner, but he kept a Journal for a year in 1824-5, which Anne Tibble and Margaret Grainger give in their ...”

“... I saw no cowboys on television but plenty on the movie screen, from the Lone Ranger and Tonto to John Wayne, and I still have a picture of myself as a little boy in a cowboy outfit with a hat and chaps and toy pistols. It’s a small indication of how deeply influenced Cubans were by our mighty neighbour to the north, and the way the fiction of the ...”

“... on land at Crécy (1346, followed by the capture of Calais in 1347), at Poitiers (1356, where King John of France was taken prisoner, and which Sumption reconstructs superbly), and the Black Prince’s final ‘disastrous’ victory at Nájera in Spain (1367). The story also has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the ...”

“... representative and responsive, began to legislate in earnest – frequently on the basis of major reports by Royal Commissions – to regulate the chaos of early industrial and urban development. It imposed obligations on factory-owners to take safety measures for their workers and on property-owners to keep buildings in a sound state, and it set up ...”

“... social organisation. In this way Freddie rather self-consciously continued a tradition: Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, are its great names. Those of genuine religious belief, but, far more frequently, fellow-travellers with the pious, have objected to this tradition. I can’t quite see why. The great faiths have their bishops and their ...”

“... they produced to support their case seem comically inadequate: a self-important windbag named Dr John F. Condon, who agreed to testify against Hauptmann only after the police had threatened to charge him with complicity in the kidnapping; a down-and-out hillbilly who was paid to say he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate on the night of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are so fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive ...”

“... the Symbolists inherited the Prazian pathological repertoire, especially the terrible woman and a major obsession with hair, and this kind of thing, a sort of Salome-complex, made them prone to allegory, though allegory was against their theoretical principles. Munch is particularly important to Goldwater’s conception of Symbolism, and he surveys the ...”