“... sample, but this is a fine collection: many budding gardeners will find it a satisfying bedside read, full of other people’s ideas about what to do with awkward plots, dark basements, and corners of grey old gardens. From my last visit to the botanical gardens at Kew a sad memory persists of the huge iron ribs of the Palm House glassless and empty, like ...”

“... case against the way the Labour Party has been run in the last few years, and it deserves to be read. Like them, I believe the Party is paralysed and must cease to be paralysed; like them, I think now is a good time to try moving; but, alas, unlike them, I do not think adopting left-wing policies and electing Tony Benn leader would be a good ...”

“... and Videotape’ at Spago and Chez Panisse. Near the great UCLA library, the licence on a Porsche read ‘IB PHD’. Back east at chilly Gettysburg College near the Civil War battlefield in rural Pennsylvania, all the talk was about ‘the Greeks’ – fraternities and sororities – whose parties, policies and rushing practices obsessively dominated student ...”

“... childhood which have been written by men, within a particular mode. She has especially in mind Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, which she describes as representing a ‘passivity of emotional life in working-class communities’, where ‘the streets are all the same; nothing changes.’ More sharply, Carolyn Steedman also chal-challenges Jeremy ...”

“... a young cavalier being taught how to cheat at cards; in another a young cavalier has his palm read, and ring removed, by a pretty gypsy girl. These pictures were enormously influential, creating a whole new class of cabinet picture all over Europe, but they may not have been as original as is now assumed. In Caravaggio’s early paintings clearly-defined ...”

“... 1832-1852), in fluency and subtlety the equal at least of those other celebrated Ford Lectures, Richard Pares’s King George III and the Politicians. Professor Gash has yet to be honoured by a festschrift. But Edward Arnold have done him proud and served readers better by inviting him to publish this collection of pieces old and new, 15 essays and articles ...”

“... would be the result of theory run riot, and so in a way it is. But with the notable exception of Richard Hare, whose practical philosophy is in any case often modified by his desire to produce a safe morality for fallible human beings rather than ‘archangelic’ moral truth, the philosophers who hold the views I have described are not pioneers in moral ...”

“... Attila, Genghiz and the like ‘fell outside the scope of Oxford’s history school’. He read military history instead and won his Blue as a boxer. In 1930 he was back in Abyssinia, attending the Duke of Gloucester at the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie, whom he had already encountered as Ras Tafari. There are sharp words for a fellow ...”

“... game – 50 or so figures, including press barons and senior civil servants – variously read and misread the fluid and changing ‘situational necessity’ in which they found themselves. The ‘abridgment’ of intractable narrative complexity into historical generalisation was anathema to Cowling; and political science – the term itself an ...”

“... Helen Castor describes She-Wolves as ‘an attempt to write the kind of book I loved to read before history became my profession as well as my pleasure. It is about people, and about power. It is a work of storytelling, of biographical narrative rather than theory or cross-cultural comparison.’ At the heart of the book are accounts of the careers of four women who ‘ruled England before Elizabeth ...”

“... set for European unity. An early version of the EEC was dubbed the ‘Union Charlemagne’ by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1950 speech accepting the inaugural Charlemagne prize, awarded by the city of Aachen every subsequent year to those who have advanced the cause of European unity. Receiving the award in 2018, Emmanuel Macron employed a ...”

“... tournaments were expensive, lurid and boastful, teeming, jostling social occasions that were, as Richard Barber put it in Edward III and the Triumph of England, part Roman triumph, part circus. The last royal tournament of 1348 was held on 14 July, in Canterbury. ‘The costumes for the entry into the city,’ Barber writes, ‘required eight pounds of ...”

“... vaguely coloured with nostalgia. They don’t engage my imagination. Even as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was ...”

“... for or against those beliefs which are defended by an appeal to evidence. It is even possible to read the first edition of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as endorsing something a little like Stegmüller’s view in those passages in which Kuhn speaks of the natural scientist’s acceptance of a new paradigm as often involving ‘a ...”

“... Again – are quite a different matter. They are single-minded and positive, and should perhaps be read for their own sake and not by anyone discussing a poet whose great strength was to be multiple-minded and negative. Edward Thomas has sometimes been represented as a hack who turned into a thoroughbred when Robert Frost waved a magic wand. Neither part of ...”