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“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... of fortune flourished,’ says the cover flap of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by ...”

“... particular store by honour and fame. Lord Holland’s were the first published reminiscences of a major politician, Brougham’s was the first full autobiography, and Lord John Russell’s the first broad-canvas memoir by a former prime minister. Even so, these were not generally regarded as good examples: Holland had an ...”

“... squeamish about dispensing with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney ...”

“... scholarship and even less in the way of serious scholarly argument. There are, however, two major issues that have produced both: the origins of the Cold War and the Eisenhower presidency – issues that have been the subject of extensive literature and extensive controversy and for which there are now not only well-established orthodox views but ...”

“... Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that solicits a general readership, placed in apposition to his name on the title-page. The first voice is scarcely of the deep, but it utters some common sense ...”

“... of his father, and for a long time relied on marginal posts (such as the Stewardship of St John’s College) in order not to have to seek employment outside the University.’ Something has gone severely wrong here: it was the father, W.H. Bateson, who never held a University teaching post, and whose one-year stint as Vice-Chancellor occurred in an age ...”

“... of atavistic self-assertion to proclaim national identity: a sub-Churchillian declension from the major fiasco that was Suez to the folly of the Falklands and thence via football-led xenophobia to mindless slogans in defence of a patriotic pound. Above all, appeasement, which the historical Churchill had the good sense to recognise as sensible politics in ...”

“... French return to Spain the paintings they had confiscated for the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre. Major works (by Titian, Raphael and probably Van Eyck, as well as by Spanish artists) which had been illegally removed and found their way into private collections in London or Paris were not returned. And Marshal Soult was allowed to keep his many artistic ...”

“... that the wonderful vision contained in the Book of Revelation was not written by a man named John (even if he was a different John from the Gospel-writer or the author of three Epistles). The book known as Acts of the Apostles claims to be by the same author as Luke’s Gospel, but this is a vexed issue Ehrman chooses ...”

“... twenty years, and while he’s still far from being a fixture of concert programmes, most of his major works have been recorded, often to favourable reviews.Jeremy Dibble is an admirer. Delius’s music was the soundtrack to his teenage years; he was drawn to its ‘lyricism and poetry’. His book focuses on Delius’s compositional processes. ‘We can ...”

“... he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former ...”

“... mechanism for coping with surplus fertility? The ancient and long-successful answer, suggests John Boswell, is abandonment: handing your child over to The Kindness of Strangers. What Boswell starts from is some well-known stories, those of Oedipus, of Romulus and Remus, of Paris, Perdita, or Moses in the bulrushes. The child cannot or must not be kept but ...”

“... consent. Robinson had been ready to be a ‘persuader’ within the Unionist community, but when Major had shown the DUP his door, he could, he said, ‘have wept that the prime minister of the United Kingdom could behave in such a childish way’. ‘I’m interested that you talk in terms of crying. Isn’t part of your problem that public opinion on the ...”

“... fragment’, as another character observes) is this rich and dense account of a life rendered. As John Bainbridge sifts through his rag-bag of memories, we close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an ...”