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“... his political manner contrasts pointedly with that of both his successors. About the second major theme of Westlake’s book – the extent to which the modern Labour Party, New Labour, is Kinnock’s creation – Roy Hattersley wrote last year that ‘the Blair Project is not a continuation of Neil Kinnock’s reforms. Kinnock wanted to establish a new ...”

“... to reconfigure our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud ...”

“... her best-known books, and now this new one, The Long Parliament of Charles II, are centred on the major figures of the early modern era: Marvell, Shakespeare, Milton and, again, Marvell. Her lifelong struggle has been to achieve freedom of thought, freedom of expression and freedom of the press for 17th-century Englishmen. It is surprising how much success ...”

“... piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance ...”

“... Little Constructions (2007), Burns’s second novel, in which the characters have names like John Doe and Jetty Doe and JesseJudges Doe and JanineJuliaJoshuatine Doe, has the same ferocious levity, but is even more intense. It’s an unsummarisable fantasia around sexual abuse and violence in the town of Tiptoe Floorboard, where ...”

“... direction, highlighting, for example, the lesser-known contemporary antagonists to whom major authors were responding. The discipline still contained a canon of thinkers whose originality, subtlety and complexity entitled them to special attention; but contextualism – as interpreted by its most anti-canonical, historicising adepts – moved the ...”

“... Especially striking is her portrait of Christian (‘Bébé’) Bérard as a jovial latter-day John the Baptist, his head neatly suspended at the edge of a round pool as though on a tray. There are also distinctive fashion photographs, like the one of a model in a bathing-suit superimposed on a pattern of sun-dappled water; or another of a tiny sailing ...”

“... insight. One only has to compare his setting of Keats’s sonnet ‘To Sleep’ with, say, John Tavener’s setting of Blake’s ‘The Lamb’, to appreciate this. Tavener’s setting is original, attractively naive, touching, but it leaves one with the feeling that it is just one of many ways in which music could be fitted to these particular ...”

“... informativeness test. I don’t at all share his optimism. Someone who finds it unsurprising that John understands that bachelors are bachelors might, I suppose, still wonder whether John understands that bachelors are unmarried men. So it appears that if, following Peacocke’s recipe, you substitute ‘unmarried ...”

“... a job which requires faith. ‘You have to believe as you go on that in fact there is some major organising principle that remains to be discovered. You have to believe that indeed it exists and that no matter how imperfect a foundation may be from one year to the next, or what setbacks occur, how many seemingly intractable methodological problems ...”

“... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...”

“... ability to convey the sense of intellectual excitement generated in an age that had one thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, who has attracted the attention of both Helen Waddell and Leszek Kolakowski. The book fails to convey a sense of change in this period, a period that Marc Bloch took as the starting point for his great analysis of Medieval society. With Mr ...”

“... next book, A Palace for a King (1980), written in collaboration with a ‘plain’ historian, John Elliott, studied the court of Philip IV and the building of the Palace of the Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid. Behind the enterprise loomed the massive figure of Philip’s first minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Olivares took it seriously enough ...”

“... exploration had already reached the North and South Poles, and had found the sources of all the major rivers, but no climber had yet got to the top of the world’s highest mountain, or even close to its foot. (The mountain straddles the border between Tibet and Nepal: Tibet was a closed country until 1911, and even then could hardly have been called ...”

“... John Wray’s first book, The Right Hand of Sleep (2001), was a historical novel, narrating the slow collapse of an Austrian hilltown into the embrace of the Nazis. His second, Canaan’s Tongue (2005), was set during the American Civil War, but in place of the wistfulness and nostalgia that pervaded his previous book, this one was reminiscent of William Faulkner in his demonic vein ...”