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“... dithering photo of the prime minister fronts What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? The cover of Christopher Harvie’s book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s ...”

“... AK-47s. The film documents what happens on the shooting range. The camera moves back and forth on a track behind the targets, showing the tourists being set up with weapons by Vietnamese ‘guards’ dressed in military fatigues. It captures their reactions – intense concentration, laughter and high-fives recorded by friends wielding cameras and ...”

“... of Africa’s languages from which substantial enlightenments have begun to arrive: as finely set forth by Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky in Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History of 1982. In applied archaeology the quantity of research now being published in a panoply of journals goes ...”

“... an athletically underdeveloped country, a combination of propitious circumstances has brought forth two world-beating runners. Nobody can hope to account for this, but the luck is worth glorying in. It embraces even the principals’ names: Coe and Ovett – as snappy as trademarks, and eminently saleable on the vowel-happy continent of Europe where the ...”

“... was that which is summed up in the slogan ‘sell-out’. Fifth Monarchists, Levellers and so forth regularly accused Cromwellians and grandees of abandoning their principles for the sake of power, place and profit. This analysis would suggest that the cause failed because its leaders, like Oscar Wilde, could resist anything except temptation. No doubt ...”

“... Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety (1611) aimed to set forth the rudiments of soul-saving doctrine in plain English. Their authors were Puritan ministers, who drew on their own experience in addressing parishioners’ spiritual concerns, and their books help us understand what those concerns were. These books sold ...”

“... lorries shaking ancient villages to their (largely absent) foundations as they thundered back and forth along the road from London to Dover. For the first part of that journey drivers had the use of the M2, but thanks to a decision made in 1963, the new motorway came to an abrupt end at Brenley Corner. Politicians and planners would give various excuses for ...”

“... papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.It is impossible to over-praise Ricks’s work in this edition. His annotations draw on ...”

“... name of morality.It would be a pity if this were attributed to a single ill-judged remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain ...”

“... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...”

“... textual ‘freeplay’? Kermode suggests one possible response in his tentative movement back and forth between hermeneutic theory and the claims of historical demystification. A similar question is broached, in different ways, by the two books under review. Peter Wollen’s Readings and Writings is a mixed bag of texts, including a number of short stories ...”

“... And yes, yes, when you rehit town next month we must arrange for you to meet her,’ he writes to Christopher Fry in 1952. This shrugging nonchalance successfully camouflages the scrabbling lengths to which he went in order to forge this Hepburn connection. As his wife tells us in a footnote, Tynan had met Hepburn only once before, on the set of The African ...”

“... from the very real tradition of parochial survey and investigation which had already brought forth the Old and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland. The more famous report of the vast Royal Commission which had reformed the English Poor Law in 1834 to make life as disagreeable as possible for the unemployed, and which has drawn from later historians the ...”

“... Christians. So while Warr did write memorably that in his time ‘teeming freedom exerts and puts forth itself’, he may not have seen the struggle in quite the cataclysmic terms the editors assume. Indeed, he was ready to concede some validity to forms – ‘not but that there is some power [of the spirit] in the form, but ’tis a weak and inferior ...”

“... shifts in religious belief, storytelling practices, property law, women’s rights and so forth, to reveal how mutable they are and how adaptable to social manipulation. Where Bruno Bettelheim believes that the motif of the lost mother and wicked stepmother is an example of fairytales’ timeless and therapeutic wisdom, providing children with images ...”