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“... great talents were needed to govern kingdom and empire, to our increasingly troubled 20th century? Peter Clarke surveys the major political figures, not necessarily prime ministers, from Gladstone to Thatcher. The Grand Old Man himself, Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Asquith and Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain and Churchill have chapters to ...”

“... It seems now that there was always something odd about Peter Robinson’s being the editor, in 1985, of Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work, from the Open University Press. Robinson’s sensibility, particularly as one had encountered it in his poems, pointed away from the aloofness of Hill’s attitude to his public, and away from Hill’s lofty and recherché diction, towards something plainer, more demotically awkward, more (the word presented itself) Wordsworthian ...”

“... every line a piece of advice, and every word a note to self. ‘The Compassionate Fool’ by Norman Cameron is therefore not a poem in which the scheme of rhyme and half-rhyme, the sound of the words and the weight of the stanzas, is the better part of the message; only an elitist would say that the shape of the poem somehow carries the sense of ambush ...”

“... Mourns’, 17 September 1966) is a star cover. Younger readers may prefer a ghoulish photo of Norman Tebbit, the Tories’ ‘New Caring Face’ in 1986, and his prince-of-darkness bubble: ‘I can’t speak to you now. The sun’s coming up.’ But if a long-lost favourite is not on view at the exhibition, it can be found again on the Eye’s website, in ...”

“... supposed. The ‘ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes’ is said to be Peter Lombard in the first half of the 12th century, though Peter was citing authorities, which makes him different from scientific modern scholars, who cite sources. Scientific history is conventionally associated with Leopold ...”

“... one. Lawrence Lever’s book on the Barlow Clowes affair combines biography and City journalism. Peter Clowes must be at least faintly charismatic to have convinced so many people of his ability and rectitude, but Lever fails to convey this. On the other hand, had he tried, he would have been undermined by the photographs in the book: saying that Clowes ...”

“... the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing the masterpieces which ...”

“... summary of how far the freedom of the word has been eroded in Glasnost in Britain?, edited by Norman Buchan and Tricia Sumner.* Though the editors are close to the Labour Party and might therefore be thought to have an axe to grind, their accounts are balanced and factual. Contributors include the Conservative MP Richard Shepherd, whose alternative ...”

“... he must first convince himself. The first experiment that convinced Florey and his two colleagues, Norman Heatley and Ernst Chain, that they might be on to something occurred very shortly alter the German Army– ‘to the inexplicable surprise of the Allied Command – instead of dashing themselves to pieces on the Maginot line, drove their Panzer columns ...”

“... Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred completes his Freudian psychoanalysis of the bourgeois 19th century by bringing aggression to bear alongside the forces of sexuality which form the subject of the preceding volumes, Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion. That aggression and sexuality are intimately associated, at once intermingled and opposed, Gay has no doubt, pointing to the ‘provocative oxymorons like “sweet cruelty”, the “voluptuousness of revenge” and “cruel tenderness” ’, in which Heine and others registered their sense of the ambiguity of the relationship ...”

“... Edmund Wilson’s cold eye cast alike on political rhetoric, Depression politics and American sex, Norman Mailer’s exploding and exploiting of American myths, are notable instances. And this hasn’t only been a male preserve: witness the admirable Janet Flanner (New Yorker correspondent from 1925 to 1975), Elizabeth Hardwick’s friend Mary McCarthy, and ...”

“... practice behind him. A graduate of the Architectural Association, he attended Yale in 1961-62 with Norman Foster; the two were in partnership, together with their spouses, until 1967. Hard though it is to imagine today, Team 4 disbanded for lack of work, but not before they had completed a breakthrough structure for Reliance Controls in Swindon, which Kenneth ...”

“... seem more likely to recover. People often confuse schizophrenia with the split personality that Norman Bates had in Psycho. He was both Norman and his mother. Norman had dissociative identity disorder. I’ve written to the LRB about this confusion but my letter wasn’t published. I ...”

“... in historical writing – by Natalie Davis, for example, in The Return of Martin Guerre, by Norman Davies in his Heart of Europe, and by Jonathan Spence in a number of studies of China. Their innovations in narrative form – making ordinary people protagonists, telling a story backwards, and so on – owe a good deal to the example of novelists and ...”

“... glorious page in our history’. An enterprise of this kind needs a rationalisation, which is why Norman Cohn entitled his classic history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Warrant for Genocide. What about the perpetrators? Goldhagen makes the valid claim that there has been relatively little scholarly interest in them. True, there are studies of the SS ...”