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“... voice came through to my Commons Office-cum-Cupboard, and rather peremptorily told me to read an article in the New Statesman, ‘The Death of Miss Murrell’ by Judith Cook. Some two days later, since I read the New Statesman and the London Review of Books on trains and aircraft between London and Scotland, I ...”

“... I see it, and now that I’m in the joke very funny it is too. But it increases my doubts about Peter Wollen’s piece on Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo, which is part of, which in fact comprises, that section of the anthology labelled ‘Women, Mexico, Revolution, Art’. Frida and Tina are, allegedly, revolutionary Mexican artistic women, linked also by ...”

“... Doctor’s last four incarnations (in reverse order: Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison), though obviously no match for Tom Baker – at the controls of a souped-up Tardis. As I write, he’s at the mercy of a gang of obese aliens who’ve long been lurking behind the scenes at Downing St, and for complicated reasons have just staged ...”

“... I assume, to one of the more famous images of the Holocaust. Here was the Terrorist section. Peter Jennings’s ABC news feed from 9/11 is piped in from somewhere under a stuffed animal, near some wires and a computer memory board. Yellow crime-scene tape wraps itself like a yellow ribbon around the top of the plexi fence, at waist height. Upstairs is a ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor ...”

“... the work as he made it. This distancing is symbolic of his social situation, for his life can be read as an attempt to reduce the distance separating an artisan such as himself and an aristocrat. Jonathan Brown begins his biographical essay with the assertion that ‘The life and career of Diego Velázquez revolved around a weighty dilemma – how could he ...”

“... information, then – as Gramsci said of Machiavelli – it is mainly the outsiders who need to read about it in books. This sort of cynical wisdom contrived to make doctrinaire Utilitarianism look gauche, just as the appeal to history was intended to make it sound glib. The historians were certainly serving their own purposes when they claimed to have an ...”

“... then she took it and popped it into her handbag unopened, saying that she did not wish to read it.’ His book deserves a better ...”

“... and obsessions turned out to be so strangely decisive, the most illuminating book I have read is Gerald Newman’s The Rise of English Nationalism. As many others have done, Newman describes how English patriotism arose from below during the 18th century and was directed specifically against France and Frenchness, but he lays particular stress on ...”

“... the opposite danger is lack of perspective, since, whenever it was written, the text is here to be read in hindsight and judged accordingly. It should be said at once that this is more than an ephemeral feat of instant publishing. Seldon has written the indispensable historical guide to the Major Government: its triumphs and its failures, its achievements and ...”

“... dinner.’ The daily life and the morbid poetry are out of kilter, and when Maude’s verses are read by her friends, it was to ‘the amazement of everyone what could make her poetry so broken-hearted as was mostly the case’. Some wondered ‘if she really had any secret source of uneasiness’, and here a nicely arched eyebrow is being raised at the ...”

“... so I looked eagerly to see how it was translated here. ‘An itinerant existence,’ we read, ‘was often the lot of the mad,’ which is certainly an improvement, even if a residual tension has now been glossed over. For, as Foucault remarks some pages on, the mad were wandering ‘on the road of a strange pilgrimage’, and there was indeed ...”

“... going well in Paris and badly in Russia would get her correspondent in trouble if the letter is read by the Cheka, a friend instructs her to write in code and to conceal – or even reverse – her questions. So ‘is it really true that people have now begun eating human flesh?’ becomes ‘is it really true that now people have stopped eating human ...”

“... fact. He has a sharp nose for the chicanery inherent in Athens’ hard-scrabble politics; he has read, and profited by, a remarkable amount of modern scholarship, by no means all of it in English. Best of all, he never lets us forget those complex and class-ridden family relationships that were, paradoxically, the main driving force behind ...”

“... it was a painful experience, which may have something to do with his feelings about Scargill. To read that his association with the miners’ leader was a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that the strike, far from representing an upsurge of working-class militancy, was ‘all about one man’ (as the Queen said to Routledge when visiting the Times) is ...”