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“... of Roger Casement’s Life and Times, with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings, by Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias, published by Grove Press in New York and the Olympia Press in Paris, was an extraordinary book. It included potted histories of Ireland, the Congo and the Putumayo in the Amazon basin, an account of Casement’s life ...”

“... was, deliberately insulated from the highly-charged milieux of the Age of Steam, Soap and Steel. Peter Harman’s new book tries to demonstrate how much metaphysics mattered in the everyday labours of Victorian Britain’s greatest mathematical physicist. Comparisons are odious, but league-tables are another feature of the public life of contemporary ...”

“... them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the process. In the 1950s Roy Thomson bought Kemsley Newspapers, added the Times to his empire in 1966, and was similarly rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords. Conrad Black came on the scene in the spring of 1985, paid £10 million for a minority stake in the Telegraph Group, and later ...”

“... problems that should be addressed by theories both of personal morality and of global justice. Peter Unger argues that we are culpably indifferent to this misery, and that our daily thinking about our duty to others is marked by self-serving irrationality. We typically believe that we do have a moral duty to rescue others who are at risk, especially where ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised report – a history – instead of attempting to ...”

“... an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later commissioned by Peter Mandelson ahead of the 2010 general election to write the higher education review that opened the floodgates to the marketisation of British universities.)The Soviet Union owned the pipelines through which all Caspian oil was exported, but with Moscow’s ...”

“... week in a country whose population was barely three times that. Still published in Dundee by D.C. Thomson, which is also responsible for the Beano, it now sells 163,000, close to the sales of the Observer. The glory days of Scottish journalism are long gone. When the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster discussed ‘the crisis in the Scottish press ...”

“... apart as chancers and innovators. Brenner picks out as the central figure among them one Maurice Thomson. His career makes an amazing story. Born in the Home Counties about 1600, the eldest of five brothers, Thomson emigrated to Virginia in his teens, where he soon became a ship’s captain, acquired land, and entered the ...”

“... The Sunday Times continued to be plagued by wilful disruption in the machine room. The second Lord Thomson decided to sell. It remains to be seen whether the Times can be saved, and if so, whether its problems can be solved. Stop Press makes these lamentable subsequent developments seem inevitable. For all management’s mismanagements, it was union power and ...”

“... highly profitable paper with a lively staff and, far from least, a model proprietor. Roy (Lord) Thomson was a Canadian businessman who had acquired the Sunday Times from Lord Kemsley in 1959 and the – then unrelated – Times from the Astor family in 1968. His flair for making money was matched by a lack of any political or social ambition, and he ...”

“... was a fairly junior member of the Telegraph’s staff for some years. As the author of the ‘Peter Simple’ column for thirty-odd years, Wharton must be regarded as immortal. As far as I know, I never met either, although I may have swapped punches or half-pints with one or other in the mid-Fifties, when I was one of the Daily Express interlopers in the ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... He has selected producers with three very different lines of goods: the Dundee firm of D.C. Thomson (for a hundred years the market leader in comics like Hotspur, Wizard, Rover, Dandy and Beano); Mills & Boon (the world’s most voluminous producer of women’s romance); and the Religious Tract Society (publisher for almost a century of the Boy’s Own ...”

“... firm came in to do glass and tiles. Soon he had a separate office and had turned aesthete. Greek Thomson, the Glasgow classicist, encountered him at dinner in 1871, where Scott ‘made his appearance in black knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he ...”