“... a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate had been equally ...”

“... have injected an element of the energy which makes attractive fictional monsters as disparate as Richard III and John Self. Chicago Loop (terrific title) is another book that has a cold, clear surface and a lurking nastiness underneath. Its central character, Parker Jagoda (terrific name), is a 37-year old architect-turned-developer who, unknown to his ...”

“... characteristically, seemed immersed in Shakespeare. With some of his staff around him on deck, he read from Macbeth the lines: Duncan is in his grave. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. A few days later the implicit prophecy had come true. McPherson presents Lincoln through his actions rather than through his reflections; this book does not often ...”

“... and his liking for ‘the study of morbid cases of the soul’ – is among the worst-edited (by Richard Curle, 1937); moreover, the original manuscripts are lost and one can only hope that Kelley and Hudson find them before their edition reaches the 1860s. The edition of the love letters by Elvan Kintner (1969) is impressive but by no means definitive: it ...”

“... accounts of them the memories and lore of the islanders themselves. Strangely, as in Synge, we read the stories about the seandream (the old people), and hear of the retentiveness of the communal memory, in the awareness that this is a vanishing resource, fading before the requirements of modern tourism and economic change. Every memorialist of Ireland’s ...”

“... 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 ...”