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“... on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet ...”

“... in which the Greeks and Alexander, though disruptive, play an essentially peripheral role. Stephen Ruzicka sets out to correct this in Trouble in the West, and he does so with formidable scholarship, a talent for extracting the maximum possible amount from evidence often as obscure as it is patchy, and a commendably objective approach to the sort of ...”

“... own book. He puts a new idea of his own into both of these books, and it urgently needs refuting. Stephen, he says (Kenner’s Ulysses, p. 152), is practically blind all through the book; his eyes without his glasses focus eight inches in front of his nose, and he broke them ‘yesterday’. This proves that whenever he claims to see anything he is only ...”

“... is that some people are liked by people they do not themselves like!’ 15 June. Talk with Stephen Graubard, editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences magazine Daedalus. Should he do an issue on Britain? Last time he asked me, I said no – Britain just isn’t interesting enough to the rest of the world any more. This time, I say yes. New ...”

“... in the Casement affair, nor could she warn him against the portentous folly of appointing Lloyd George to the War Office. In a sense, or so we are invited to believe, her fall prefigured his own. Better-equipped to deal with Margot’s relationships with couturiers than with the complexities of high politics, Mrs Bennett flounders in her treatment of ...”

“... Aspinall’s notable work Politics and the Press (1949) does it for the period 1780 to 1850, and Stephen Koss pays full tribute to his predecessor. Professor Koss is one of the few American historians of the top rank writing about modern British political history (as opposed to pre-revolution English history). He is producing a work which, to judge from ...”

“... English judges have added little to jurisprudential debates.’ In 1954 Mr Justice Lloyd-Jacob wrote to the Times about the importance of confining atomic energy to peaceful uses. Lord Hail-sham, then in practice as a QC, wrote angrily to Lord Chancellor Simonds, who in turn wrote to the judge: ‘In my opinion it was a breach of your duty as a ...”

“... the size and impersonal complexity of the universe are familiar from other works of fiction post-Stephen Hawking – Martin Amis’s Night Train, for example. ‘Imagine an atom of hydrogen,’ Alfredo says. ‘Then imagine that you have enlarged the nucleus by five million million, bringing it up to about the size of a one peso coin. To scale, the electron ...”

“... to greater effect. Michael Foot speaks in the tones of Churchill in the Second World War and of Lloyd George in the First. It is fair to say that these two statesmen have often been numbered among Michael’s heroes. Still, I never expected to find myself applauding, though with some anxiety, the dispatch of a naval force to the South Atlantic. This leads ...”

“... on mortality and immortality. And then there’s the respectable nerdiness of it all. Leslie Stephen, founding editor in the 1880s of the original DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own ...”

“... future for Winston Churchill with his ‘noisy mind’ and childish egotism, and doubts whether Lloyd George will ever become prime minister (three months before he topples her husband). In fact she starts a new volume of the diary at the end of July 1916 by claiming that ‘Henry’s position in the country and in the cabinet is stronger than it has ever ...”

“... used for this purpose was supposed to be simply an expression of scientific parsimony. It was Lloyd Morgan’s canon of 1894, whose reasoning, as Stephen Walker points out, is extremely rum. It rules that ‘in no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be ...”

“... years from 1904 to 1915, spent in Trieste, saw the completion of Dubliners, the transformation of Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the composition of Exiles and Giacomo Joyce, and the beginning of Ulysses. He returned briefly to Dublin in 1919-20, but by 1915 his artistic soul was forged. The Trieste decade, it seems, has not ...”

“... What emerges most clearly from these books is that the Russian ‘mafia’ (the Italian name has been taken over into Russian) has so deeply penetrated government, business and the security forces as to have reconstituted the society which lives on one-sixth of the earth’s land surface into a wholly criminal formation. Organised crime, all four writers warn continually, has encircled the globe, has found in Russia a safe laundry for its money and is trafficking in nuclear material drawn from the ex-Soviet arsenal ...”

“... inhibitions? If a Lion Could Talk invites that sort of grouchy and tendentious speculation. Stephen Budiansky wants to know whether animals think. Quite sensibly, he has gone to what science there is for what answers it affords, and the book is a report for a lay audience. Well researched and easy to read, it’s a success by the standards of this kind ...”