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“... by two two-volume books that have been praised by journalists to the skies. They belong to a grand design, to a project set to tell the story of modern Britain (modern England as a rule) from 1945 to 1979; the present instalment, Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, covers the narrow gap from 1957 to 1959. ...”

“... demonstrations, and fears of an armed uprising were intense. ‘I passed yesterday with the Grand Jury,’ a Lancashire magistrate wrote in 1839, ‘shovelling in bills against the rioters and orators by dozens: I am happy to think that we have been suddenly transformed to an absolute despotism as to speaking or arming. A copper cap or a piece of ...”

“... melancholy and enraged as their hopes of presiding over a liberal Germany diminished. At a grand ball in January 1887, the Crown Prince was reported to be ‘so hoarse that he could hardly say a word’. The condition persisted and was diagnosed in March as throat cancer. Vicky, desperate for a more optimistic second opinion, placed her trust in the ...”

“... A hopeless thought; one might as well go to Venice and expect to find quinqueremes on the Grand Canal.’ But his humane conscience is never in abeyance. He taxes the planners with doing little for the 60,000 Glaswegians on the dole, then rises to a piece of scalding satire, two imaginary timetables for the ‘aspirer’ and the ‘non-aspirer’. The ...”

“... of lost worlds. Greenblatt, for all his fondness for the rhetoric of particularity over that of grand narrative, approvingly cites Erich Auerbach’s idea of the part as leading to a felt sense of the existential whole. For Greenblatt, this is what an anecdote does; it is a device offering ‘representational plenitude’. At the same time, his suspicion of ...”

“... and a peacock called Mirabell, all of it recorded with the help of Merrill’s longtime partner, David Jackson, during twenty years of séances using a Ouija board at their home in Stonington, Connecticut. This volume tips in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his ...”

“... sport and considered the gap between the IOC’s claims and the reality of its actions. David Miller’s Igniting the Games is not that book. As its subtitle suggests, it is primarily a celebration of Bach’s heroic attempts to surmount the crisis. Miller has past form for leaving out uncomfortable facts. His official history of the IOC describes ...”

“... more musical argument into its dramatic adventure than an hour of Cavalleria Rusticana. The grand original principle of dramma per la musica – the bare intonation of the spoken word heightened and deepened by the infinitely suggestive dimensions and refractions of music – all too often ends up in a fudge, the bold expression of emotion curdling into ...”

“... pet name, if they have one: so you get two Berties (Edward VII and George VI), Georgie (George V), David (Edward VIII) and Lilibet. When it gets to the Windsors’ foreign cousins there are Willi, Nicky, Charlie (of Norway), Foxy (of Bulgaria), Missy and Mignon. The joke was exploited long ago in Cecil Beaton’s spoof My Royal Past, though Tomlinson’s ...”

“... A recent Italian book on the films of David Lean is called Colour and Dust, and with an amplification or two the phrase offers a pretty good description of his later work. The colour is mainly orange, and a lot of the dust is sand, especially in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). More generally, of course, the phrase evokes the director of swirling epics, a sort of Cecil B ...”

“... David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... Scriptures for their own purposes, calling them their Old Testament and so redefining them as a grand and varied preface to a New Testament, which tells of the life of Jesus Christ and its consequences. A generation or two back, many would have heard most of this story in a Christian Sunday school. They would have retained at least the exciting bits, such ...”

“... The title of David Abulafia’s magisterial book comes, as he reminds us, from a Hebrew blessing, to be recited when setting eyes on the Mediterranean: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea.’ His book is a two-fold history: first of the trade and the traders who discovered the sea, created its ports and never ceased thereafter to animate it in pursuit of commerce ...”

“... the Party, the crisis within ruling circles in the Eighties, perestroika. On all these subjects, David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb is the more acute and penetrating guide. Kapuściński spends no time in dissidents’ apartments, or at the crowded press conferences in Moscow’s international press centre; high politics bores him. He has slipped away from the ...”