“... ruled by what was usually the least abusive type of occupation regime, a military government. As Richard Cobb has told us, the governor, General von Falkenhausen, was happy enough in Brussels to return there in 1952 to marry his Belgian mistress. Falkenhausen’s assistant, General Reeder, who conducted day-to-day affairs, was a reasonably correct ...”

“... of the picture of schizophrenia which he presents, influenced in part by Alasdair Mac-Intyre and Richard Rorty, who themselves are transmitting a message from the hermeneutic writers Grünbaum attacks in his long introduction. His aim is to insist, without denying inherited dispositions, biochemical imbalances, and occasionally inescapable destinies, that ...”

“... on the intransigence that slowly and bitterly infects participants in long-running disputes. The English bishops appear as neither heroes nor villains, but as men whose office placed them between the hammer and anvil of a governmental system at war with itself. We see the vulnerability of the political dissident in exile when Henry II succeeds in getting ...”

“... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...”

“... Both Dracula and Frankenstein owed their immediate afterlife to unfortunate theatre adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The ...”

“... in his desires. He is sincere when he lectures or comforts other rulers, when he suggests to Richard Nixon that he should come to Uganda to recuperate after Watergate, when he congratulates Mrs Thatcher on her fresh, charming and attractive appearance in her victory photographs. Her election as Tory leader exercises his mind, and the fall of Mr Heath is ...”

“... vanguard of reform, many of Arran’s critics believed he was sabotaging the whole structure of English society. ARRAN HOMO was regularly painted in large red letters on walls outside his London clubs, and human excrement arrived along with the hate mail. Miss B., his secretary, opened these packages. Refusing to let Boofy see one pile, she said she had ...”

“... refereeing blunders. At the same time, neither would be there without flashes of wondrously un-English brilliance from Zola and Juninho. These players – Zola for Chelsea, Juninho for Middlesbrough – have injected a new interest into our post-Gascoigne soccer scene, a new possibility of unexpectedness. Would we have loved them, though, if they had ...”

“... plays and novels were eventually translated into 30 languages, and he knew everyone from Richard Strauss to Walther Rathenau. He even persuaded Mussolini to reduce a friend’s prison sentence. But though he courted the famous and the powerful, he insisted on his own indifference to politics. The account in his autobiography of his experiences during ...”

“... carried out the plan made during their occupation in 1812 to lay it out in the fashion of the English landscape garden, a tasteful ruff of trees around each monument. Too many sites with their own particular abandoned qualities have been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, ...”

“... three canvases. He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting a picture herself. Often they would create ...”

“... on the subject of Fascism, The School for Dictators, and after the war achieved real fame in the English-speaking world with his first-hand account of Communism, published in Richard Crossman’s The God that Failed. He has often been compared to Orwell, and shared with Orwell a deceptively plain style (in fact, one full ...”

“... politics and Irish history. But Connolly’s work has not always been taken seriously. Last year, Richard Bourke and I tried to remedy this by publishing a selection of his writings in The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution.* Liam McNulty’s new book also helps us to understand the international and transnational contexts that shaped Connolly’s ...”

“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s ...”

“... him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural superstition and natural magic here. He admires Bunyan for his ‘strong doctrinal preaching’, his opposition to the civil and ...”