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“... Peter Hennessy’s new book hasn’t persuaded me that its central preoccupation, the current dispute over prime ministerial power and its extent, is not sterile and, indeed, rather boring – yet it is a splendid read. The truth is that the Westminster system is quite inadequately democratic and transparent, and Hennessy is, if anything, too respectful and conventional in his proposals about how the office might be reformed ...”

“... Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are nourishing to the spirit. Livy, Machiavelli, Ford, Dekker, Heywood and Jonson all figure in the book, but the main recurring subject is Shakespeare. It is, moreover, good to see the publication of this book marked by an accompanying Festschrift – a volume of essays on comedy by friends and colleagues of ...”

“... Graef never seems to recover from his introduction with its ominous reference to ‘my friend Sir Peter Imbert’ (the Metropolitan Police Commissioner). He started out, I suspect, to write a critique, but the result is little more than sophisticated public relations for the boys in blue. There is a John Ford film about a ...”

“... a little rough stuff – not even when they’re being beaten to death. After Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford finishes pasting Joyce Lakeland in The Killer inside Me (‘I backed her against the wall, slugging, and it was like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving way at once’), Joyce doesn’t try to run away or fight back, because no matter how bad he ...”

“... and technical virtuosity ... the almost imperceptibly modern, silver-chiming resonance of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” ’. These aspects of the ‘new’ poetry ‘do much to ameliorate popular displeasure’. Certainly under Marianne Moore’s considering eye all the starkness of the new disappears into her own vision of ‘all this fiddle’, as ...”

“... to it (‘The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit’ at www.detroityes.com). Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford on his office wall; some people attribute the industrial systems of the death camps to Ford’s influence. In 1957 the GM President declared: ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America, and vice versa.’ The ...”

“... of decisive incidents, both familiar and sombre: the Notting Hill Riots of 1958; Tory candidate Peter Griffiths winning Smethwick six years later with the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’; Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968; the New Cross fire of 1981 which killed 13 young black men and women; the riots in St ...”

“... Hall and its architect, Alfred Waterhouse, earn four pages in a thin allowance of illustrations. Ford Madox Brown’s wonderful cycle of history paintings there gives Hunt his jumping-off point for expounding Manchester’s sense of its own worth – just as the Victorians no doubt intended they should. The town halls of Liverpool, Leeds, Bradford and ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... she was determined to maintain Cecil’s brisk, persecutory line. One of her 1916 articles smeared Ford Madox Hueffer as a Jew who wrote unpatriotic books. Hueffer was Catholic and had been gassed while on active service in France, but no matter. Another article attacked Whitechapel Jews for going to Underground shelters when Zeppelins dropped explosives, thus ...”

“... was to Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1980s, and Made in Dagenham (2010) was to the Ford sewing machinists’ strike of 1968 – to allow viewers some minutes of unchallenging celebration that sometimes, passingly and briefly, the people who deserve to win really sort of do. At one point, the film shows us Alexander’s little daughter, prancing ...”

“... control of barricaded republican areas. Much to the chagrin of the British commander, Robert Ford, the IRA was thus enabled to fight another day – and a bloodbath was avoided. During the early years of the conflict the main tendency of this contact switched from operational discussions to high-level engagement aimed at a settlement.The first attempt at ...”

“... England 1918-51, which concentrated on the social history, now followed by the publication of the Ford Lectures delivered in Oxford in 2008, which concentrate on the political history. The story McKibbin tells, with predictable skill, is of the way the successful Edwardian alliance between the Liberals and Labour came to be followed by the disintegration of ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... of the rise and present institutional character of English Studies. A similar case was argued by Peter Widdowson and his contributors in the ‘New Accents’ volume Re-Reading English. It is hardly surprising that their arguments were met with great hostility by those (not only ‘Leavisites’) who continue to believe in the vital role of English as a ...”