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“... Roy Porter on the language of sickness in Georgian England could usefully have been longer and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and ...”

“... religious history, of Jacobitism and the previous abortive attempts to restore the descendants of James II to the throne. Instead we go straight into a military encounter, the Battle of Prestonpans, on 21 September 1745. ‘Two armies were moving to contact in the country to the east of Edinburgh’ is the book’s first ...”

“... of war and the revisionist interpretation recently advanced by his Cambridge colleague Christopher Clark. (It is unfortunate that Evans decided to end a book so full of new and interesting material with Sir Edward Grey’s familiar lament on 3 August 1914 that Europe’s lamps were being extinguished – a darkness for which Grey himself was partly ...”

“... want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He ...”

“... introductory survey of Parliament (not only the Commons) between 1386 and 1421, and Linda Clark’s illuminating statistical appendices, this volume breaks new ground in providing a remarkably informative series of 135 substantial ‘constituency surveys’. Based on independent and original research, these range from Helston in Cornwall to Hythe in ...”

“... poked fun at your own celebrity, vanity and substance intake, how much more meta can you go? His next novel, Imperial Bedrooms, a belated follow-up to Less than Zero, confirmed a sense of dehydration. Fiction, you felt, was becoming harder for Ellis to sustain, the risk-reward ratio more difficult to justify (‘Three years of my life compressed into ...”

“... typical female role model of the conformist period was June Allyson, pouting loyally at home while James Stewart, camped out in the Mojave Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The letterbox format was less suited to June ...”

“... and a masochist; for more than 15 years he was also one of the finest actors in America – as Clark Gable put it, ‘that faggot is a hell of an actor.’ His beauty, his drinking, his homosexuality, his failure and his unaccountable talent have all re-formed themselves as elements of the icon that stands in for Clift, a potent image of the suffering ...”

“... trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection ...”

“... up, through vertical cuts in the white walls, to the four floors above, where you are enticed to go directly by elevator or escalator. At this point you might run out of synonyms for ‘grand’, yet you never feel overwhelmed by the space, as you might in the Guggenheim Bilbao or Tate Modern: MoMA is about tasteful uplift, not in-your-face awe, and the new ...”

“... years. Swinburne is devoted to him at the start, as is Siegfried Sassoon at the close, and Henry James is going to address over four hundred letters to him. He weathers two major storms, one emotional and the other resulting from a rash claim that if not a poet he is at least a scholar. Becoming Librarian of the House of Lords, he luxuriates acceptably amid ...”

“... got it right when they had Judy Garland playing a star-struck teenager gazing at a pin-up of Clark Gable and singing ‘If you were the only boy in the world’. It’s if, not when. Mix them up and you remember the story of Gable resting on set minus his false teeth shouting gummily at another passing icon: ‘Look here, Marilyn, America’s ...”

“... to the exploration of black in the work of many African American painters, including Kerry James Marshall and Glenn Ligon.) The centre of Painting (11.30.92), an enormous mixed media work on linen, is almost entirely white, except for a thick smear of coral. Around the edges of the canvas, brushstrokes in black, red and blue suggest forms, perhaps ...”

“... Arts and Crafts design. In Riding House Street, north of Oxford Street, a building by H. Fuller Clark of 1908 announces in gold and green mosaic, over a couple of floors, that it was the premises of Boulting & Son, Sanitary and Hot Water Engineers. Another of Clark’s schemes, the ground floor of the Black Friar beside ...”

“... hoarding books rather than cash, and the novel’s excellent jacket-picture by Emma Chichester Clark has a promising glimpse of him peering at a tome, surrounded by towers of unsorted volumes which wait their places on the empty shelves in the gloom beyond. Unfortunately Lamming’s prose never quite measures up to that picture: the book-hoarding ought to ...”