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“... shortage of actual instances of articulate unbelief. This intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Michael Hunter’s book, which combines lightly revised versions of his previously published essays with newly written chapters to advance a distinctive argument about the significance of atheism in England and Scotland before the Enlightenment. Building on ...”

“... J.R. and M.C. Jacob have produced new and exciting syntheses in the grand manner. The object of Dr Hunter’s book is to reconsider the ‘academic dimension’ of the new science, and its institutions. He avoids ‘uncritical counting of heads’ as a means of deciding how many Fellows of the Royal Society were ‘Puritans’. The answer, of course, always ...”

“... the first place because, as a Royalist in 1650s, there were no openings for him in public life. As Michael Hunter suggested in his contribution to the 1998 colloquium, Evelyn’s subsequent career as connoisseur, savant and writer was something of a pis aller. Elysium Britannicum is thus a not-altogether-easy mixture of Royalist politics, modern ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was ...”

“... Since then, a number of historians have tried their hand at the prosopography of the saints. Michael Goodich has attempted to draw ‘a profile of 13th-century sainthood’, André Vauchez has studied the later Middle Ages, and now two specialists in Italian history, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, have surveyed the whole of Western Christendom from ...”

“... discounted it wouldn’t have made any difference: the new Conservative MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, would just have been elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450. Hunter won’t be seeking re-election in May, having seen his majority – which peaked in 1992 at 21,198, making Basingstoke an apparently ...”

“... of Hungarian nerve, social bluff and show-business instinct once commanded the British cinema. In Michael Korda’s telling, however, the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry ...”

“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a ...”

“... venality and bumbling on the other. When the contents of a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden found their way into the hands of the New York Post, Schreckinger reports that Steve Bannon wanted the tabloid to publish ‘racy’ images of Hunter with Hallie, his brother’s widow, in order to ‘break’ his ...”

“... politics, indeed too much. Instead, a warm welcome for a new book by that indefatigable tramper Hunter Davies. This one is A Walk along the Tracks,* an exploration of the disused railway lines which have now accumulated to 8,000 miles, with no doubt more to come. Some of these lines have been taken over by enlightened local authorities and turned into ...”

“... be possible to treat some of this material in a wider ideological context, as has been done by Michael Hunter in Science and Society in Restoration England (1981), with its impressive analysis of the scientific community at local and national level. Some of the diplomatic history seems faintly old-fashioned, and maybe we needed an entry on the United ...”

“... but without it life would be meaningless as well. Or so the characters come to suspect. Michael Ahearn, the leading man of Stone’s new novel, Bay of Souls, starts out as one of these worldly protagonists. Quietly dissatisfied, fond of the bottle but sustained by the unexamined vestiges of Catholic faith, he teaches American literature in a sterile ...”

“... Tragedy of Macbeth takes its cue from the witches. Or, rather, its one witch, played by Kathryn Hunter, who multiplies herself when she feels like it. Early in the film she stares at us across a pool while talking to Macbeth and Banquo. She is alone but there are two reflections in the water, neither of them in the right place to be hers. Then suddenly ...”

“... time, that sex is not always fun. The brothel where she works is run by the incomparable Kathryn Hunter, who played all three witches in Joel Coen’s Macbeth, and who here looks like some sort of elf in Tolkien who has decided to change their line of business. She and Bella and Bella’s friend Toinette (Suzy Bemba) all see themselves as devoted to freedom ...”

“... and sophisticated proto-culture’. Everything that we are today has emerged from the hunter-gatherer tradition. ‘All of our ability, the development of our intellect, all of our early culture grows out of those kinship groups operating overwhelmingly in a co-operative way ... The hunter-gatherer is what ...”