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“... Bismarck or Hitler, but no fewer than three Anglo-Saxon historians have tried their hand recently. Thomas Kohut gave us Wilhelm II and the Germans in 1991; Lamar Cecil needed two books to capture the life, the second published in 1996. Now comes John Röhl, with the first of three projected volumes. Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious ...”

“... however, is where the resemblance between them ends: for the rest, it would be hard to find a more extreme contrast in historical methods. Professor Underdown, as he makes clear in his preface, sees no virtue in attempts at explanation of the Civil War which concentrate on political events at the centre. For him, it is necessary to understand society in ...”

“... the time Samuel Steward began to write his autobiography in 1978, at the age of 69, he’d had sex more than four thousand times with more than eight hundred men. Each encounter was carefully recorded in his ‘Stud File’, an alphabetical card index which occasionally included physical mementos. There were records for Lord ...”

“... want to look at what they take this statement to mean. Adding so-called ‘Asian values’ – a more public-spirited, Confucian version of the Protestant ethic – to the 19th century’s self-congratulatory belief in the West’s ‘civilising mission’, Huntington and Harrison have discovered that the West can keep on congratulating itself – not this ...”

“... be hard but in some ways it’s easier than painting in watercolour, and watercolours are often more beautiful. However, the prejudice the rhyme encapsulates does arise from real differences. A typical oil painting is an object, a substantial piece of work displayed on a wall. Its colour is strong, the paint may be thick, may even stand proud of the picture ...”

“... 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in Thomas Sadleir’s An Irish Peer on the Continent (1920) and in Lady Londonderry and H.M. Hyde’s The Russian Journals and Letters of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (1934). For the present selection, which covers both tours, Elizabeth Mavor has gone back to the ...”

“... the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister Castle, from his wife’s cousin, Sir John Fastolf. The Pastons always married well. They fought to maintain the Fastolf inheritance – in the courts against competing claimants but also with crossbows and poleaxes against the dukes of ...”

“... essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting.’ But others found this odd sense of irreality more winning, or at least arresting. Getting to know him for the first time, his future sister-in-law reported delightedly that Shelley behaved ‘just as if he were Adam in Paradise before his fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the ...”

“... of what she called the ‘master story’ of Christianity. There was no reason for Sabar to be more cautious at the time. The text had been vetted by the Harvard Theological Review, and although two of the three anonymous reviewers had been sceptical, the world’s leading papyrologist, Roger Bagnall, had pronounced the fragment genuine. King had assured ...”

“... culture known as the book. Books on management aren’t just pouring out: they are also becoming more confident. Gone are the studious attempts to constitute management as a properly boring academic subject, or to justify recommendations and prescriptions in terms borrowed from more respectable disciplines. The leading ...”

“... first simply searches your belongings for signs that you are who you say you are; the second is more concerned to establish your guilt by planting some offending item upon you. On the one hand are the followers of E.D. Hirsch, whose concern is to establish the original and ‘correct’ meaning of a text. According to Hirsch, this is the meaning the author ...”

“... its vigour, and an index of civility. In the early 16th century, though, Neo-Latin verse was much more than this. It was a rich political resource. Neo-Latin panegyrics were a good means of winning friends and pleasing princes. Latin verse was also the perfect medium for humanist poets who wished to go beyond the parochial constraints of national politics to ...”

“... on the wind, Comes and goes on the brain. With the 1980s came The Passages of Joy, containing more free verse than ever before and speaking openly, for the first time, about the poet’s homosexuality. It also contained some of his weakest material to date, but he made a comeback in the early 1990s with The Man with Night Sweats, a ...”

“... At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good’. A voice, apparently coming from nowhere, says: ‘You wonder? That’s all? What about “care”? Don’t you care?’ The surveyors explain to the voice that surveying is what they do ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”