“... and redemption, of long-awaited messiahs and of betrayals with a Judas kiss. The challenge John Campbell has set himself is to write an authoritative though not authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher that acknowledges its subject’s calibre while sorting through and sifting the legends that have grown up around her. In this, the first of two ...”

“... Mile Island and Chernobyl may have diverted attention from the dangers of fossil fuel emissions. John von Neumann, the US’s most brilliant scientific-political adviser of the postwar decades, wrote in Fortune magazine in 1955 that once nuclear power generation had overcome the design limits of older hydrocarbon plants, ‘energy may be free – just like ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American ...”

“... facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s ...”

“... years of Africa as I had months – almost After Casement’s arrest in 1916, Conrad wrote to John Quinn in New York: We never talked politics ... He was a good companion: but already in Africa I judged that he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don’t mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion. By emotional force (Congo ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation. Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of ...”

“... Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before and since, owes its popularity to the fact that ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ is still for many ...”

“... first volume of the Ohio University Press Browning, under the general editorship of Roma King Jr; the most recent volume brings the reader from ‘A Soul’s Tragedy’ to the first volume of Men and Women. This fifth volume incorporates some changes in editorial policy and personnel which reflect the rough reception the Ohio Browning has ...”

“... lawyer Pat Finucane has prompted MI5 to release documents which may well lead to a public inquiry. King Abdullah has been exposed egging on the US to attack Iran. The Libyan government’s threat of dire retribution if Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi died in jail in Scotland concentrated the mind of the UK envoy in Tripoli, who was already talking of his release as ...”

“... bottles, he was being much funnier with werewolves and tigers. Our little dialogues were between John and Mary; his, and how much better, between Bertie van Tahn and the Baroness. Even the most casual intruder into one of his sketches, as it might be our Tomkins, had to be called Belturbet or de Ropp, and for his hero, weary man-of-the-world at 17, nothing ...”

“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of ...”