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“... representative and responsive, began to legislate in earnest – frequently on the basis of major reports by Royal Commissions – to regulate the chaos of early industrial and urban development. It imposed obligations on factory-owners to take safety measures for their workers and on property-owners to keep buildings in a sound state, and it set up ...”

“... social organisation. In this way Freddie rather self-consciously continued a tradition: Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, are its great names. Those of genuine religious belief, but, far more frequently, fellow-travellers with the pious, have objected to this tradition. I can’t quite see why. The great faiths have their bishops and their ...”

“... they produced to support their case seem comically inadequate: a self-important windbag named Dr John F. Condon, who agreed to testify against Hauptmann only after the police had threatened to charge him with complicity in the kidnapping; a down-and-out hillbilly who was paid to say he had seen Hauptmann near the Lindbergh estate on the night of the ...”

“... issue to be settled on non-controversial lines. This was a serious phase in his career, as John Grigg’s fine biography makes clear. It is certainly not enough to dismiss the 1910 coalition memorandum, as Mr Sykes does, as the product of ‘an attack of nerves’. From 1910 onwards, L.G. was to some degree an Empire man, if not protectionist. He was a ...”

“... are so fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive ...”

“... the Symbolists inherited the Prazian pathological repertoire, especially the terrible woman and a major obsession with hair, and this kind of thing, a sort of Salome-complex, made them prone to allegory, though allegory was against their theoretical principles. Munch is particularly important to Goldwater’s conception of Symbolism, and he surveys the ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army officers at a time when the major threat to the nation was believed to come from the Catholic states of Europe. He then packed the 12-judge court which was going to decide the legality of what he was doing. Its finding in favour of a regal power to suspend or dispense with Parliament’s ...”

“... defence of nations’. Who were the heroes? No one below the rank of captain (or, in the army, major-general) was commemorated in St Paul’s. Soldiers and sailors appear in a few of the monuments, gazing upward in adulation. There were no ‘general war monuments’ to the fallen, in St Paul’s or elsewhere: this refusal to develop ‘a more democratic ...”

“... You don’t have to know a lot about 17th-century British history to see that many of the major events of that century are represented in miniature in Bennett’s town: a revolution of the saints has come before the novel begins, while a restoration of the corrupt Lord Savile, and even a great fire, come at its end. Havoc’s aspirations extend more ...”

“... This effect presages the ‘dark style’ met later in the exhibition in Caravaggio’s St John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1603) and his Salome of c.1609, a forsaking of fine description for brute urgency that met with Bellori’s censure. For a follower, like Bellori, of the Italian tradition based on figure drawing and epitomised by Raphael, the ...”

“... with Spanish troops. Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet is the first major biography of its subject since 1915. Rarely is a scholarly book so spirited, or a spirited book so scholarly. Duncan-Jones’s learning, always profound and never advertised, is communicated with elegance and lightness of touch. She aims ‘not to ...”

“... been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than with the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of ‘democratic citizenship’ and ‘civic identity’. Here original truths matter less than accumulated ...”

“... against the authoritarian powers of China and Russia and has found an influential reader in John McCain, an old-style promoter of American toughness. But it’s now quite hard to imagine Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, not to mention Osama bin Laden and other ‘enemies of the Free World’, quivering at the thought of a ‘concert of ...”

“... which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the ...”