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“... Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though three names appear upon the title page, they have pooled their intellectual capital to a ...”

“... escape the matricidal trauma? An influential chorus of unreconstructed Tory journalists fingered John Major for ‘the ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout ...”

“... true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and cultural histories of the 1980s. What emerged ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a lord mayor.) He was tall and, if not quite clean-cut, skinny. He looked as if he would converse by shuffling his large feet and muttering ‘Aw, shucks’. (Thus kids muttered in novels of the period. What they said ...”

“... Left to know itself, they have edited the eloquent works of a pre-socialist exponent of liberty, John Warr, who in the months around the execution of Charles I in January 1649 urged sweeping legal and political reforms. In Warr’s eyes, ‘liberty was the antithesis of power,’ not of property as Winstanley the Digger might have maintained: ‘it ...”

“... first name – came to expire of a burst bladder in Prague is explained, along with much else, by John Robert Christianson. The centre of gravity of Tycho’s Island is Danish social history: in irresistible detail, Christianson interprets Tycho’s behaviour in the context of the customs and expectations of the Danish high aristocracy. Tycho’s island was ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style took on added significance when ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”

“... O’Brien, reviewed in the present issue, dramatises the experiments and predations of the surgeon John Hunter, founder of the Hunterian, as he sniffs out his raw material – including one of the ‘Irish giants’ who showed themselves to the crowd for a fee in 18th-century London. The new, modern sensitivity to these abuses grows out of the corpse of ...”

“... would otherwise trample them underfoot: this is the famous institution of judicial review, whereby laws passed by Congress or the state legislatures can be struck down as unconstitutional if they violate certain individual rights – to personal freedom as in the case of abortion, or to equal treatment in the case of racial segregation. Britain, too, may soon ...”

“... at the centre of attention, which he enjoyed, and under the watchful supervision of his future in-laws, which he did not. He lodged with the Noailles in Paris, where he had no home of his own, and his rough edges and excitable manner did not sit well with them. The only thing Lafayette and his in-laws could agree on was ...”

“... remarked: ‘I’m asking you for a light, but I see I’ve forgotten my cigars.’ The laws of hospitality prevailed over the laws of flirtation. ‘Come inside, you’ll be given everything you want,’ said the waistcoat-maker, on whose face disdain gave way to joy. For me the scene is deeply intertwined with ...”

“... when he wrote that he could measure with mathematical precision a people’s respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead. Of course, Gladstone inhabited a century and an England in which funerals were public and sex was private and, though the British were robbing the graves of infidels all over the world for the British ...”

“... famously successful advertising campaign of 1947. The ads are worth seeking out: since antitrust laws prevented the cartel from doing business in the US, they couldn’t promote De Beers directly, so what you end up with are surreal meditations on the relationship between diamonds and courtship. They’re commercials for romance itself, with paintings of ...”