“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor ...”

“... war broke out, Cantos 52 to 71, known to initiates as the Chinese History Cantos followed by the John Adams Cantos, seem to him as to many of us wrongly conceived as well as sloppily executed. His dislike of them takes a special turn, however, when for the failure of the Adams sequence he blames John Adams, not ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”

“... not Stalinist terror, was the chief threat Russia faced. Yet Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, remained captive to the fantasy of rolling back communism in Eastern Europe rather than containing it (as Kennan had been advocating). When US propaganda outlets encouraged Hungarian dissidents to rebel against their government, then failed to ...”

“... magazine Alpha publishes estimates of top individual earnings. The 2007 list was headed by John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who earned $3.7 billion by betting that the value of securities backed by US sub-prime mortgages would collapse. He was followed by George Soros ($2.9 billion) and James Simons ($2.8 billion). These are figures far beyond even the ...”

“... shows that from the moment the US entered the war, the treatment of Blacks in the military was a major source of controversy. The Black press demanded the integration of the armed forces. Military commanders strongly resisted, claiming that white soldiers would resent being in close proximity to Blacks. At a meeting of Black editors with War Department ...”

“... by P.W. Botha, who has since become prime minister of South Africa.Botha’s committee drew up major proposals for constitutional reform which have been endorsed both by the Cabinet and by the four provincial congresses of the National Party, whose structure and importance are discussed in a fascinating chapter on Afrikanerpolitics, ‘How the system ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... his most gruesome details yet, including the murder of two and three-year-olds. This time the major media finally paid attention: Meadlo appeared on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes and A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times phoned Hersh twice to ask if he could get him an interview with Meadlo. Hersh hung up twice. Starting a book on My Lai, with Meadlo ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented: ‘A “search for the Mother” had become a major component of the “unconscious nostalgias of the Western intellectual”.’ The only such figurine found in Britain, however, is probably a fake, and belief in passively fertile Mother Goddesses has now gone out of fashion. Even where we have ...”

“... strategy’ from the specificities of Gramsci’s ‘Italian dilemma’. One of Nairn’s first major publications was an English translation of Giuseppe Fiori’s biography of Gramsci in 1970, which revealed in new detail his struggles against poverty, sickness, fascism and imprisonment, as well as enemies on his own side. Nairn’s Gramsci was a ‘man of ...”

“... to the Islamic world and that newly politicised movements were appearing in virtually every major religious tradition. In America, the New Christian Right challenged and temporarily checked the steady secularisation of politics. Commenting on the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches, Peter Berger, doyen of Weberian theorists, was forced to ...”

“... productivity and hence loss of production to the industrialising countries of the Third World. Major employers show steadily less willingness to suffer obstruction from British labour when they can take advantage of a plentiful supply of docile workers in the poorer countries. Yet so far, Crouch suggests, the Trade Union movement has not shown itself ...”

“... and Salerno operations, he at least had unique experience among available Americans of commanding major amphibious landings; because he was outstanding in his ability to organise and animate an allied headquarters; and, perhaps most important of all, because Roosevelt decided that he could not sleep soundly at night if George Marshall, who would have been his ...”