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“... it actually means ‘in the relative scale’. Updike never shied from applying his descriptive powers to the female body the way he would to, say, rural scenery; as the years went by, it wasn’t something that endeared him to his critics. (His defence: ‘description is a form of love.’) High school was the only place, with a few exceptions, where he ...”

“... comes to find it difficult to write about Charles without moderation. Instead of thinking, like Dr Richard Cust, that revision has tended to throw out the baby with the bathwater, he thinks that there are large quantities of Whig bathwater still to be drained. Many of Dr Sharpe’s arguments will be engaged by historians for some time to come. He does not ...”

“... white) American pop – during a spell in the Army. He shows us a sideman playing for Little Richard (‘I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice’) and, later, an itinerant with catholic tastes in New York City, listening to anything from the sonorous Ornette Coleman to Bob Dylan, the ...”

“... spend in opposition. Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Anthony Crosland’s reflections on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in ...”

“... 1642, is shaped at least in some degree by the need to seek out an ancestry for the separation of powers. By contrast, Joyce Appleby’s essay is valuable in large part because it stresses what was un-English about the 18th-century American dream – the abundance of American land. The availability of landed property for a majority of whites enabled men like ...”

“... closely into the price of rhubarb and cabbages. ‘A few clean-run British officers with plenary powers would very soon set things right’ in that quarter. And when either middlemen or retailers are discovered to be making more than a fair profit we should ‘clap the offenders in gaol’. From all this Doyle emerges as eminently a trenchant writer, and one ...”

“... impact on the Soviet Union make valuable contributions to assessing the prospects for change. Richard Owen was the Times correspondent in Moscow from 1982 to 1985, while Martin Walker has been the Guardian’s correspondent since 1984. Their approaches provide an interesting contrast. Owen’s, as his title indicates, is avowedly Kremlinological, and the ...”

“... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, Miles dismisses Salammbô as ‘the most ...”

“... at the end of his Wars of the Roses tetralogy: while Henry VII may have been as murderous as Richard III, he was nothing like as charming. Francis Bacon was ready to praise Henry’s politic wisdom in the 1622 biography that was to frame perceptions of the king until late in the 20th century, but he could not disguise the price of Henry’s determination ...”

“... most harrowing account of such an exile in his story ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. But many others, Richard Rhodes James for example, have recorded their experiences as ‘orphans of the Raj, paying the price of empire by a separation from parents’. Parents, too, of course had to pay the price, especially mothers, who were forced to choose between living for ...”

“... atheist denying a dying or dead Catholic the consolations of religion. Coming away I see Richard Ingrams, swathed in a black anorak, trudging along the pavement. He has a brief word with Fr Cunningham, much as, one feels, Oxford dons used to have with the train driver at Paddington when he’d brought the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In ...”

“... which made it possible, over the decades, to ‘map’ the human brain, ascribing specific powers to equally specific ‘centres’ in the brain. Towards the end of the century it became evident to more acute observers – above all, Freud, in his book on Aphasia (1891) – that this sort of mapping was too simplistic, that all mental performances had ...”

“... in the 1780s was Col. Stephen Digby, the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain.) It is a tribute to Guest’s powers of perceptive analysis that some less promising 18th-century writers can just as usefully illustrate differing tones of exemplary reverence or exhortation, postures of explanatory authority or humility, and varying tensions between private and public ...”

“... his shrewdness and his patience were never in doubt. All of them were shattered by relentless powers against which his talents were quite futile. Listen to Callaghan himself, describing his feelings as he took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1964, after Labour had won an election in peacetime conditions, when no one was out of work: ‘In all the ...”

“... in fiction. In Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian, a ‘menacing Arab’ with ‘potent mesmeric powers’ lays a curse on the narrator that results in everyone else in London being wiped out by plague. In Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, which went through 15 editions between 1899 and the First World War, a vengeful giant ...”