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“... articulate beneficiaries of this were the two greatest social fantasts of the 19th century: Saint-Simon and Fourier, the subjects of Ricoeur’s last two lectures. Their visions of humane, but technocratic societies seemed clearly realisable, and Fourier, at least, did his not very effective best to see his realised. Both sought to transform the social worlds ...”

“... fatal flaws make his or her downfall inevitable. But why? This new edition of the novel, edited by Simon Avery, has appendices that include those early reviews, as well as Hardy’s own prefaces to various editions, maps, extracts from contemporary works of science and philosophy that Hardy read, a small selection of his poetry, pertinent passages from his ...”

“... of the ‘failure of Modern architecture’ has been a lucrative occupation for the likes of Simon Jenkins, but unlike Jenkins, Richards was the Great Insider. As he said in ‘The Hollow Victory’, he was ‘in the middle of the campaign for modern architecture’, and sure enough, among the illustrations to Unjust Fella, there is a group photograph of ...”

“... because ministers routinely blame the agencies or their legal advisers or their civil servants. As Simon Lee points out in his excellent essay on ‘Law and the Constitution’, one of the reasons ministers ‘seemed to flounder’ when asked by the Scott enquiry why they signed public immunity certificates was ‘that they themselves have become conditioned ...”

“... reform. It remains an open question whether Castro will be that ‘pragmatic’ even now. Robert Quirk’s new biography devotes only 34 pages to the Eighties and Nineties. Otherwise, the topics covered by earlier biographies are exhaustively recapitulated, at the expense of the subsequent developments that invite reappraisal of Castro’s whole ...”

“... or, Shakespeare in Love enjoyed mass appeal in Victorian England. One fatuous confection by Robert Folkestone Williams, The Youth of Shakespeare, went through six editions in three countries, besides being translated into German, and the author was encouraged by its success to complete a Shakespearean trilogy. Since, as Helen Gardner says, ‘the facts ...”

“... Labour prime minister. MacDonald was elected chairman and leader, as the press at the time, and Robert Mackenzie much later, stressed. MacDonald had the charisma, he had the contacts with the Left, and he profited from the general disenchantment with the war and those associated with it. That said, it is impossible to see the worthy Clynes as a ‘lost ...”

“... of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture. I take these quotations from Robert Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean ...”

“... of the 1380s and 1390s. The young king and his courtier counsellors – Michael de la Pole, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Sir Simon Burley were the most prominent – clearly eyed with fear and hostility Gaunt’s vast landed wealth and the influence it gave him. Twice, in 1384 and 1385, members of the court (and ...”

“... observations which epitomise the art of film come in as asides, as when, writing about Michel Simon, he invokes ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so necessary (and dangerous) in screen acting’. (This, by the way, is a rewrite. In the previous edition it read: ‘the special mingling of self and character that is so hallucinatory in ...”

“... we drop down into Kendal and the Abbot Hall gallery, where there is a touring exhibition of Robert Bevan pictures. The shows at Abbot Hall are just the right size, and never more than three or four rooms. The Bevans are shown alongside other Camden Town paintings, the best of which is a lovely, glowing, slightly abstract picture by Spencer Gore, The ...”

“... views on foreign policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and pusillanimous Americans. The differing attitudes of ...”

“... This play is also lost, but it was seen at the Rose in early 1600 by the astrologer-physician Simon Forman. His brief account of it, found among his manuscripts at the Bodleian, reveals a farrago of greed and gore: pure pulp melodrama. It begins with John Cox shooting ‘an arrowe thorow his unkells head to have his land’. After Cox’s death the next ...”

“... of what he thought were like-minded professional historians to advise him. Niall Ferguson was one; Simon Schama was hired to convene a committee to produce a draft. But Gove wasn’t satisfied. Ferguson wanted the curriculum to have a global dimension, which wasn’t what Gove wanted at all; the proposals put forward by Schama’s committee also deviated too ...”

“... surprisingly elaborate constructions are erected, whether shaped by the genial indulgence of what Simon Russell-Beale called Greenblatt’s ‘love letter’ to Shakespeare, or by the hard-nosed iconoclasm of Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), whose determination ‘to bring Shakespeare down from the lofty isolation to which he has ...”