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“... extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the early New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of 1916-29 that virtually destroyed ...”

“... dismissive biography of Mussolini and his scathing treatment of Italy’s royal family, Denis Mack Smith has turned back to a figure who fully engages his sympathies, and some may miss the darkly satirical tone of those earlier essays in denunciation. Mazzini is a work of passionate advocacy, which aims both to remind us of its subject’s enormous importance ...”

“... epoch in which any individual could singlehandedly precipitate a major shift in human thought. Adrian Desmond and James Moore place Darwin above Marx and Freud. It is hard to think of successors to that trinity of lone rangers in an age when research is financed by foundations and carried on by teams and generally mounted on the kind of scale where the ...”

“... In a world where dockers vote Tory and Cambridge graduates become KGB colonels, predicting class behaviour is a chancy business. Let me conjure up a still more incongruous example. Conceive a manor-born gentleman, with a private fortune exceeding £30,000 in the 1840s, respectably Whig and with a family dislike of fierce radicalism. He is Cambridge-educated and until recently a prospective parson ...”

“... more often than not as source material for whimsical and mildly defamatory character sketches. Adrian Frazier’s painstakingly researched new biography of Moore marks a considerable advance on Joseph Hone’s respectful but pedestrian 1936 standard biography and Tony Gray’s lively but unscholarly 1996 Life. Moore was born in 1852 into the West of ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... the basis of the science described in Dehaene’s book is remarkable. The British neuroscientist Adrian Owen uses brain-scanning technology to study people incapacitated by an accident or stroke. Clinicians had become familiar with locked-in syndrome, whereby a person is paralysed except for one tiny window of voluntary action, such as the capacity to move ...”

“... influence at an early age, and later subjected to university in large, impersonal classes. So Adam Smith, a mother’s boy all his life, can be seen as free from parental domination because he was a posthumous child. Camic offers various references to the Scottish concept of patriarchy, but the belief that parental domination over thought and behaviour can ...”

“... tables, the haven around which tabloid editors and owners expected their products to be read. What Adrian Bingham’s Family Newspapers? shows clearly, if a little solemnly, is that the popular press has always tried to suck readers in with banner headline titillation, inside-page innuendo, and pictures of women as déshabillée as the times would allow: to ...”

“... was also linked to the ‘new’ poets and had just become engaged to the anthologist Janet Adam Smith, a former assistant editor of the Listener, a magazine associated with that newfangled thing, radio. He was just the person to do the job.Bucknell tracks Roberts’s trajectory from left to right and situates him in a milieu where ‘style wasn’t just ...”

“... was to promise the povo that the big white farms would be divided up after the defeat of the Smith-Muzorewa regime. His response was contemptuous: ‘All that will be decided when we are in power.’ Zanla, he said, were not proper soldiers. The pungwes they held simply put the local people in danger. Terence Ranger argues that the Emergency in Kenya ...”

“... her in steering a course away from her own mother’s demands. Strachey’s mother, Mary Whitall Smith, lived for emotional drama and the struggle, as she would later put it, for ‘self-development, real education, knowledge, enjoyment’. From a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers, Mary shocked her parents by marrying Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic ...”

“... departure doubtless depended on the proceeds of his forthcoming fight with Jim ‘Black Diamond’ Smith, slated for 15 September. (Boxing archives list various Jim Smiths around this time: he may be the heavyweight from Westchester, New York, who fought in the States between 1908 and 1917.) Two days before the fight, a glimpse of Cravan is granted us by the ...”

“... foam-rubber gloves were off in the fight for Britain’s comedy soul. Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith took aim at the old guard with a withering attack on The Two Ronnies as ‘The Two Ninnies’. Adrian Edmondson on The Young Ones ranted about The Good Life, Felicity Kendal and twee British sitcoms. Ben Elton peppered ...”

“... he arrived in Grantchester he’d taken advantage of the relative privacy to seduce Denham Russell-Smith, the younger brother of a schoolfriend, in what he later told Strachey was a deliberate attempt to ‘do away with the shame (as I was taught it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James and Norton and Maynard ...”