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“... than to research. The problems of identifying political meanings in literature are raised again by Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis 1632-1642, an exciting (if unhappily titled) first book in which a bold argument is advanced with clarity and verve, only to be half-spoiled by overstatement. Butler aims to rescue the ...”

“... and Europe. This sprawl of conference papers mounts no coherent case, but it does illuminate what Martin Butler, in his alert essay on Stuart masque, calls ‘the invention of Britain’, by throwing open windows to the Continent. A clear view of Europe is worth having not just because the instability of Stuart Britain finds parallels in such Early ...”

“... politicians mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook of the Caroline gentry. Beneath that social level, as one would never guess from the standard social histories of the period, huge audiences ...”

“... comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”

“... constitutional guardians, also registered concern by voting against the motion to delay. And Lord Butler, a keeper of precedents when he was cabinet secretary, declared that the decision generated a constitutional crisis with parallels to the crisis of 1909. That crisis stemmed from the election in 1906 of a progressive Liberal government that faced an ...”

“... Seventeenth-century critics thought Ben Jonson England’s finest writer. Even until the mid-18th century he was conventionally regarded as at least Shakespeare’s equal. It was he more than anyone who won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities ...”

“... hero Sardanapalus as a model of regal behaviour. The books by Hermione de Almeida and Philip Martin are much more direct attempts to meet the challenge Byron makes to the literary critic. If he is a major poet, as not merely his reputation but the size and scope of his oeuvre insistently suggest, which are the great works? How far should we forgive his ...”

“... finally concerned with the onset of modernity in the world’s ‘first new nation’, as Seymour Martin Lipset described the United States. The quest to identify the origins, sources and nature of modernity is perhaps the grandest project of the human sciences – which is not to say that it lends itself to asking useful questions about particular ...”

“... the world outside it continues to go to hell. Lauren Oya Olamina, the visionary heroine of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, lived until she was 18 in a gated neighbourhood in Robledo, southern California, with her clever father, a Baptist preacher, and resourceful stepmother, who kept a garden with peppers, tomatoes, squashes, carrots, lettuce and ...”

“... leader on the barricades (that production to open in London next spring) is very doubtful. The Butler and Kavanagh book has no cheerier message for the Labour Party. It traces how opinion in the British electorate – in particular on nationalisation and the trade unions – has been shifting over a number of decades, and it is these longer-term movements ...”

“... empty-headed, self-centred diarist has a marriage on the rocks (‘Joe left word with the butler he’s going to the country this afternoon for the weekend; of course he wouldn’t stoop to say what country’), and spends her days gossiping on the phone and primping for the evening’s drunken party to which, invariably failing to attract a new ...”

“... seem to evade our questions by not allowing the wholly uneducated to speak. (The silence of Robert Martin in Emma, the character nearest to a working man, saves her from having to represent accented speech.) Yet on Emma’s left in the diagram we have all Austen’s vulgar characters, as well as her women – many are, in fact, the same people. It does look as ...”

“... Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, curated by the English photographer Martin Parr, is made up of around 250 works by 23 photographers who came to Britain for long and short periods between the 1930s and 2014. The division between the two floors of the gallery offers a useful temporal break: the first fifty years upstairs; the later ...”

“... them – except, of course, Lord Home. Under the procedure devised by Macmillan, the Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, and his assistants, were to sound out MPs; Lord Dilhorne, the Lord Chancellor, was to sound out the Cabinet; and other dignitaries were to consult other segments of the Party. Macmillan’s diary has Redmayne as originally a Hoggite (i.e. a ...”

“... still very accomplished, appeared in 1976. The central figure of Sadler’s Birthday is a retired butler who has inherited the house in which he had, indispensably, served – not an obvious choice of theme for a young woman’s first novel, but expertly handled. Over the years since that debut she has become, by means of exercise and research, a genuine ...”