“... certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a trench full of glowing charcoal. As with the trench method, the populace gathered to watch or to read about how the defendants survived this ancient, agonising, irrational test ...”

“... battlefield as imagined in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to ...”

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”

“... of geography to deliver basic exposition of the cities and towns they pass through. The journey north involves some inherent cliffhangers: they have to jump on and off moving trains, for example. But even Cummins gets tired of this material: ‘It’s amazing that riding on the top of a freight train can become boring, but it’s true.’ A series of ...”

“... story has been mythologised. The only one who didn’t want to be her was her immediate successor. John Major got the job because people were finally sick to the back teeth of Thatcher’s governing style. It is hardly surprising that political leaders should try to avoid replicating the failure that immediately preceded their arrival at the summit. Major set ...”

“... and some land), training (Architectural Association School, plus practice in London, Ireland and North America) and professional experience as the editor of the Architectural Review on and off since 1935. And he knew absolutely everybody. In his case, however, architecture meant the Modern Movement, something which the Establishment didn’t like at the ...”

“... it was Chamberlain, breaking with old orthodoxies, who sought to achieve through tariff reform Sir John Seeley’s vision of a Greater Britain equipped for the struggles of the 20th century. Many efforts have been made to interpret Chamberlain and the great U-turn he performed in mid-career. Inevitably, the supporters of Mr Gladstone regarded him as a traitor ...”

“... their cat, Vinegar Tom, in a cramped cottage on the outskirts of Manningtree, a small port town in north Essex where the Stour widens into an estuary. Rebecca and the Beldam usually get by doing laundry and needlework, but it’s 1643, a year into the First English Civil War, which means the men are away fighting and the women have enough time on their hands ...”

“... be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and ...”

“... and compelling fiction – flourish in Holland in the 17th century? A simple answer is supplied by John Berger. The world in European realist art is ‘rendered up to the spectator owner’. There is an emphasis on the tactile, and the framed easel picture, conceived of as a window or a mirror, is also like ‘a safe let into the wall, in which the visible has ...”

“... And this is a far longer history than we are accustomed to recognise. Isichei begins with the North African Christianity of early saints and martyrs, and the strivings of an African Church so thoroughly erased by the onset of Islam after about AD 700. Hastings starts with the mountain-shielded Christianity of Abyssinia – a country he prefers to call by ...”

“... is healthier than in most mainland cities of its size. Belfast will never be the Athens of the north, but compared to Dublin, which is looking more like its Naples all the time, it seems trim and buoyant, with an almost manic optimism in the air, the irrational euphoria of the survivor. If our towns, like the French, adopted the custom of listing their ...”

“... for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports a novel spin on this: he was shown round the house by a guide who maintained adamantly that it had once been the home of Rembrandt.) On the day of the inauguration Harar was abuzz with dignitaries and a concomitantly heavy presence of police and ...”

“... most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his readership. Prynne has been compared with John Ashbery, but there is little of Ashbery’s canny slackness of tone or perspective. The poems, by contrast, are dense and alarming; where Olson conceived of the poem as an ‘open field’, Prynne is inclined to think of it as a battlefield, as in ‘Die a ...”

“... 1791. Discovery proceeded via Cape Town, Australia and New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii, to the north-west coast of America, where Vancouver was to chart the coast and the Inside Passage, for the most part unnecessarily, for the job had in large part already been done, though Vancouver did have the pleasant job of assigning good British Imperial names to ...”