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“... Paul Johnson’s thousand-page book is geared to the present age of long print runs and mass marketing. It is one of the currently popular narrative histories written by Britons who position themselves mid-Atlantic, in order to address the American reader. At a thousand pages Johnson’s book is longer than Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989 ...”

“... Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets shouted down by the encyclopedic. But there are many valuable discussions: Stevenson shows that much postwar fiction was ...”

“... floor to some feet above your head. Although the hill shading was done by the watercolour painter Paul Sandby, it is not exactly a work of art: one of the few exhibits which qualifies for that description is the map of the siege of La Rochelle engraved by Jacques Callot in 1631 and thickly peopled with the kind of tiny soldier-figures which make the scenes of ...”

“... as ‘natural children’ (Emma is unimaginable without one such product of ‘vice’, Harriet Smith). Either way, Austen must have been aware of the possibility she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between ...”

“... lights were nine elderly men, all into their seventies or beyond. Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as ...”

“... This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David ...”

“... of portraits by Lamb, Coldstream and John because of its linear clarity and bite, and a Matthew Smith holds your eye by force of juicy paint and saturated colour alone. Yet thin paint in the work of Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash is part of an Englishness (or rather of two sorts of Englishness) which, even in the context ...”

“... wrote to describe the work of Bratby and others – Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith – who were busy painting chip fryers, dustbins, toilets. The Kitchen Sink realists were soon famous in a time of Angry Young Men; a decade later Bratby painted Paul McCartney. But Cooke wanted to paint too, and Bratby ...”

“... The book gathered a buzz, went to America, won a prize from the Believer, then in 2008 Zadie Smith wrote about it in the New York Review of Books, in tandem with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Smith immediately got the point of the McCarthy project, its vehemence, its attack on the plushy poshlust of what she called ...”

“... and ‘the tyranny of reason’. Aleister Crowley used peyote in his séances. Frederick Madison Smith, the grandson of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, explored it as a possible means of achieving religious ecstasy. Smith also lobbied against the prohibition of the ...”

“... free-market remedies; and how the Centre for Policy Studies, egged on by accomplices like the Adam Smith Institute, ultimately succeeded in hi-jacking the Conservative Party. It is a case-study in the way that ideas are dangerous, for good or evil. Hayek was Austrian by birth but had held a chair at the London School of Economics since 1931 and had become ...”

“... Liverpool, who favoured strongly interventionist measures, thought it absurd to follow Adam Smith, who had ‘pushed his principles to an extravagant length and in some respects had erred’. Yet, as usual, the disciples were more dogmatic than their master. Smith had recognised that on food as on religion government ...”

“... much more memorable) story. David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher is a worthy winner of the W.H. Smith award, the latest of the series of literary prizes awarded to novels published in 1984. In this, his ninth novel, Hughes has written a moral fable, brief, sensational, and hauntingly tense. The word ‘haunting’ is used advisedly. Ghost stories, with ...”

“... writer had learnt and intuited from having daughters of her own. It also has a Jamesian narrator, Paul Manning, an apprentice railway engineer who possesses a feminine power of observation (he notes as odd that his cousin Phillis Holman, although a grown woman, still has the childish habit of wearing a pinafore over her dress). Gaskell’s eye for the ...”

“... by the German Hans Habe (who had returned from exile in America) and the American William Gardner Smith. Both books portray affairs between black GIs and white German women that are ultimately doomed because of the attitude of the American army. Smith’s hero finds it odd that ‘in the land of hate, I should find this one ...”