“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ The line is echoed in Citizen Kane. The Cubans were already fighting for independence from the Spanish, and the US, the argument goes, liked the ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... initially brings to the foreground, in as offputting a first chapter as you are ever likely to read. He describes himself as a sex addict in the grip of an irresistible need to seduce, with a special preference for teenage girls. To Princeton and other campuses he came, burning with an indiscriminate, bisexual and, in the age of Aids, potentially fatal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one of the millennial hysterics lined up by Elaine Showalter in Hystories – fictional son of Richard Rhodes perhaps, a scientist who has written about the making of the atom bomb, and also described how he was abused in a book called A Hole in the World. However, in Acts of Mutiny recovered memory is used in a literary – not to say, Gothic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was a publisher’s commercial decision; yet it is not really credible that anybody wanting to read this book would be so inveterate a ‘general reader’ as to be scared off by a few foot or endnotes. The facts necessarily include a lot of information about the operations of the East India Company and, less directly, about the economic assumptions 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 ...”