“... national contexts at all, and misses some of the best French material altogether (such as Robert Martin Lesuire’s corrosively funny 1760 novel Les Sauvages de l’Europe, a virtual catalogue of anti-English stereotypes). And without contextualisation, the observers, like the observed, blend together into a homogeneous mass. This problem undermines ...”

“... of the barbed wire spring holds full sway,’ Mary Berg wrote in 1941. ‘From my window I can see young girls with bouquets of lilac walking on the “Aryan” part of the street. I can even smell the tender fragrance of the opened buds. But there is no sign of spring in the ghetto. Here the rays of the sun are swallowed up by the heavy grey pavement.’ The ...”

“... of the gendering of fantasies of remote control. In an 1892 article on female circumcision, Dr Robert Morris declared that ‘the clitoris is a little electric button which, pressed by adhesions, rings up the whole nervous system.’ Dr Morris’s intervention provoked some panicky speculation as to the way that amount of pleasure might be brought speedily ...”

“... finds his father again in strange circumstances. The scene was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a ...”

“... liability’ offences, and efforts (often highly controversial) to tame and civilise recalcitrant young offenders. Progressive ideas about poverty, which from the 1900s to the Fifties circled around the issues of mental deficiency and biological-cum-cultural heredity, have swung dramatically in the direction indicated by Wootton – towards seeing poverty ...”

“... of adulthood, she soon starts to wreak havoc. She engages herself to Archibald McCandless, a young medical colleague of Godwin’s (the novel is actually written in the form of McCandless’s memoirs, heavily annotated by Gray), but, hungry for experience, chooses first of all to elope with an unscrupulous solicitor, and leads him a merry, financially ...”

“... are] cowards, loungers, without majesty, without awe, antiquity, foresight, character; old bucks, young bucks, and Biddy Buckskins. He runs on colloquially, ‘talking’ warmly and unselfconsciously. If only his friends could do the same. Since Bridges destroyed his own letters to Hopkins, the new material in this edition – the letters back to Hopkins from ...”

“... all that clever-clever experimental Nabokovian crap he thought of his son as writing. And when young the poncey smartarse was a leftie (by his father’s standards, anyway), and would go on about it. But one is still left envying aspects of Martin’s relation with his father, Kingsley buying his early post-pubescent sons a gross of condoms or doing his ...”

“... mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide. The primal blood-lusts of the war on terror survived Obama’s renaming of it. The Seal Team that in 2011 eventually scalped Osama bin Laden ...”

“... to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair ...”

“... opinion, his is the best, and psychologically the most convincing, account of how a well-educated young American of the 1950s and 1960s could think of himself as a ‘liberal’ and still be a committed Cold Warrior. As he says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... hearing in this country. And Wallace deserves, at the least, a fair hearing. Colin Wallace, as a young Ulster Protestant, was infatuated with the symbols of the Union – the flag, the Crown, the Presbyterian Church, and the Army. He became a school cadet, a B Special, an Army marksman and parachutist, showing such outstanding energy and commitment that by ...”

“... this association. The Enemies of a Bishop (1929), published here for the first time, ends with Robert Bicknell shooting his Spectre, a crime the village policeman greets with typical equanimity: Policeman: Ee’s dead. ’Oo is ’e? Robert: My spectre. I had one. Policeman: That’s unusual. I’ope you’re coming ...”

“... of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. It took little time for Edward Young’s fully-formed new sentence, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’ (1742), to become tomorrow’s proverb. ‘Old soldiers never die’ (Foley, 1920) is undying. ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’ (Kipling, 1911) will last ...”