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“... establishment of BBC television’s reportorial and documentary conventions. Kenneth Allsop, Fyfe Robertson, James Cameron, Trevor Philpot, Robert Kee and Slim Hewitt (‘the scourge of Nuneaton’), all worked for it. The roles of writer, photographer and even picture editor often overlapped. ‘Memories of the late 1940s and 1950s are ...”

“... global doom, one by Felix Rohatyn in the New York Review of Books, the other by Peter Jay and Michael Stewart. It is perhaps too easy to mock Apocalypse 2000 as being full of Oxford PPE clevernesses, and some of its predictions (e.g. the maintenance of military rule in South Korea) look like going wrong very quickly (a more annoying fault in a book full ...”

“... under 18th-century mortality levels. At some point in their lives Adam Smith, John Miller, William Robertson and David Hume began to question the theology in which they had been reared: Camic is convinced that ‘their revolution was a union of circumstances’ – in other words, that it was their rearing which freed them for it. That Adam Ferguson did less ...”

“... and an enemy of the Enlightenment, though he has changed his positive allegiances a good deal; Michael Sandel, like Charles Taylor and Pope John Paul II, makes a great thing of ‘identity’. They stress the difference between the way we are ‘constituted’ by our membership in a variety of communities and the ‘abstract’ individuals that thinkers ...”

“... is a bizarre, depressing and unreadable book which comes with an endorsement from Michael Moorcock (‘Tony White reports from the margins, the way all our best writers do’) and an optimistic but inaccurate billing as ‘the bastard offspring of Starsky and Hutch and The X-Files’. The gimmick is that the book is a monologue narrated ...”

“... scout who spotted Kate Moss on a plane would have thought much the same as the painter Graham Robertson when he noticed Langtry walking past Apsley House. Lillie began her career as muse, model and archetype to the likes of Millais, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Watts and Poynter within the month. Society was just as quick to take her up. Vanity Fair gushed in ...”

“... Britain by William Klein examines some of the modifications. The picture is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive ...”

“... birth, life, death and meteoric rise to fame, Ern Malley has continued to provoke virulent debate. Michael Heyward’s shrewd and funny book not only provides full social and literary contexts for the affair, but explores Malley’s almost equally intriguing afterlife. Much to the dismay of his two inventors, he was no sooner invented than he cut loose and set ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... prolific and, until this centenary, largely forgotten American writer of sea tales called Morgan Robertson published Futility, or the Wreck of the ‘Titan’. Fourteen years later he cashed in by changing the tonnage of the fictional ship to nearer that of the real one, and cutting ‘futility’ from his title. ‘She was the largest craft afloat and the ...”

“... Hawthorne. No circle in the South could match that intellectual array. Nevertheless, along with Michael O’Brien, Genovese has successfully revived interest in Southern antebellum thinkers whose obscurity, they claim, is unmerited. The Southern Tradition reaffirms his long-standing devotion to the pro-slavery thinkers but takes still greater delight in ...”

“... P.N. Furbank on E.M. Forster, Philip Williams on Gaitskell, Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and Hugh Thomas on John ...”

“... Westland, the Sun naturally backed her, and so when Patrick Mayhew, the Solicitor-General, told Michael Heseltine that his account of the rival bids might contain ‘material inaccuracies’, this confidential legal advice was immediately leaked to the Sun, whose sensitive and nuanced front-page account of the discussion was a banner headline: ‘you ...”

“... devolution as a plan to secure the Union; put another way, in the partisan words of George Robertson, it would ‘kill nationalism stone-dead’. However, others begged to differ. Not only the Tories, but also Labour’s open devo-sceptic, Tam Dalyell, contended that home rule and the resulting potential for friction between Edinburgh and Westminster ...”

“... marry their sisters, and mothers don’t cut their babies’ throats. Six years ago, when Robin Robertson translated Euripides’ Medea, he added an epigraph from a poem of Brecht’s: In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes there will also be singing About the dark times. Perhaps the singing of dark times is popular now because tragedies are ...”