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“... actor, or even, god save us, a news announcer, will get far more airtime than the demise of a major scientist or philosopher. In the world of the media, a Jack Benny or an Eamonn Andrews are far bigger men than Sartre. Similarly, the media are a thousand times more interested in Dallas and Dynasty, Coronation Street and Eastenders, than in anything that ...”

“... favour, and to seek advantage at a distance. Well served by his agents, especially the invaluable John Husee whose letters would alone make the collection worth having, Lisle heard everything: his correspondence is stuffed with what must in Henrician terms be called political inside-information. It is not gossip that gets recounted in these mentions of ...”

“... its traditional electorate, a desertion from which the Conservative Party of Mrs Thatcher drew a major benefit. The third is the emergence of an intellectual counter-revolution on the right. The interconnections are numerous. The ideologisation of Labour and its electoral decline are obviously related: a lot of Labour voters are turned off by the shrill ...”

“... Terence Ranger’s major new exploration of Zimbabwean peasant politics spans the ninety years from the early colonial period to the 1980s. While drawing heavily on his own intensive research in the Makoni district of Manicaland – virtually a scholarly fief of his – Ranger constantly illuminates Rhodesia’s tortuous passage to majority rule by comparison with two contrasting ‘models’ of decolonisation: Kenya (conservative) and Mozambique (a luta continua ...”

“... housewife has for long been regarded by her, even if not by the law, as a family resource. It was John Hajnal in the 1960s who first alerted historians to the features of the marriage system prevailing for many centuries in Northern and Western Europe: late marriage and a sizeable proportion of permanent celibacy. The phrase ‘the Hajnal marriage ...”

“... The ‘major reinterpretation’ of City and Crown politics, promised by Professor Ashton in his book on the English Civil Wars, and long awaited, has now been published in a slim volume covering the years from 1603 to the outbreak of the Civil War. Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s ...”

“... to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the Royalists, Muhammad was Cromwell; John Milton and other Parliamentarians responded by equating Charles with the prophet. Those who idolised the king as a martyr had ‘stolen the pattern from Mecha’, Milton wrote. Muhammad had been an all-purpose heresiarch, but now he devolved in the European ...”

“... leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to have been killed by Maoists in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry ...”

“... and sordid crash against the tree would nearly obliterate what had come before. He had been a major cultural figure in China; now his poems were being read as flashbacks from his death. He was born in 1956 in Beijing, the son of a well-known poet and army officer, Gu Gong. At 12, he wrote a two-line poem, ‘One Generation’, which was to become an ...”

“... by 1517, within twenty years of its completion. Leonardo was equally unfortunate with his other major wall painting, the Battle of Anghiari, for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. This was abandoned unfinished because of problems with the technique he had attempted, and the composition is known today only through copies. None of the other works mentioned by ...”

“... the Americans, in 1975 Whitlam was removed from office on flimsy grounds by the governor-general, John Kerr, and intelligence co-operation resumed. Kerbaj refrains from judgment on whether the CIA had a hand in the matter.In New Zealand, there was a more sustained challenge to the country’s position as a far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and ...”

“... available even without the kind of ‘publication’ we are accustomed to.Piers Plowman, the other major poetic work of the later-14th-century alliterative tradition, survives in more than fifty copies and fragments (it is very long, and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to ...”

“... irony . . . and from the practically Dickensian humour governing the characterisation in the major novels.’ In the same volume there is a fierce essay by Timothy Buck on the insufficiencies of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by ...”

“... woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of condition and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well, when he suckt another of contrary ...”

“... is almost certainly the right one: a large proportion of the electorate concluded that the major parties had nothing to offer them and stayed away. That might be hard on the Liberal Democrats, but it’s true enough of the other two parties. It is the adoption by the Labour Party of a neo-Thatcherite programme, modified too late for many (and thus the ...”