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“... but Christie’s cheerful iconoclasm appears not only more durable but also morally more sturdy than the Leninism that it sought to supplant. If the Angry Brigade was a left heresy, it’s good to be reminded what the orthodoxy was. The shadow of the 1960s may turn out to be not so insubstantial after ...”

“... the Wars of the Roses. These views have not gone unchallenged. In the 1950s May McKisack wrote a sturdy defence of Edward (rightly praised by Mortimer). Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, in a series of books and articles based on extensive work in the record sources, Mark Ormrod argued vigorously that Edward had been a conscientious, ‘hands-on king’ who ...”

“... way to advancement for capable boys. He was the ninth of Margaret Ogilvy’s ten children, and two sturdy older brothers were already established as the focus of family ambition. James was a puny child, distinguished by neither athletic nor academic prowess. His brother David was his mother’s ...”

“... have consistently displayed a capacity for division of counsel and confusion of purpose in which David Steel would have felt thoroughly at home at any time. ‘An ill-organised miscellany of view-points’ is how Paul Addison, in The Road to 1945, describes it from 1916 on. Or as Neville Chamberlain wrote in his diary for 19 October 1935, ‘our party is ...”

“... Paris Commune. Charles X appears only as the monarch who made Gros a baron and refused to allow David back from exile. The Siege of Paris in 1870 is merely an aggravation of Edmond Goncourt’s grief at losing his brother. This elimination of historical detail corresponds to the idea that Romanticism, once detached from specific causes – the Terror and ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much flashbulb.’ It ...”

“... of the novel’s triumphs, a complex, difficult, convincingly intelligent woman. She has grown up sturdy and unconventional, with a confidence partly learned from a blue-stocking mother, a friend of George Eliot, and partly developed in her solitary childhood. Orphaned at 18, she sets out for Sydney, and uses half her parents’ fortune to buy a glass ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... Their resolve fortified by the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and their idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the founders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, for example, identified himself with Cato of Utica, whom the 18th-century British knew best through the medium of Addison’s popular tragedy Cato (1713 ...”

“... attempts remained slavish. Paradoxically, then, German Classicism arose, abruptly, through a sturdy revolt against the unities in drama and against the tyranny of a foreign culture. In spite of these difficulties of definition, Reed offers a clear, finely written, dramatic account of the double peculiarity of the great age of German literature: the stony ...”

“... his deathbed is wired for sound. A relief, then, to turn from all this deranged big-talk to some sturdy English self-effacement. John Haffenden is steadily becoming the closest we have to a domestic version of the Mansos and Grobels. He has already published a book of earnest conversations with a dozen or so poets and this month he gives it a ...”

“... his children in his own independent way, often on a yacht, all dressed in sailor suits, among his sturdy Suffolk seamen. Both grandfathers wrote very well about interesting subjects: they were learned, clever, efficient, schoolboyish, sportsmanlike. Tap might have been a hero for an H.G. Wells story, while Bertie belongs rather to Rider Haggard and Conan ...”

“... turned critical of the Soviet Union, bitterly disappointing their hosts, were excoriated.Michael David-Fox’s Showcasing the Great Experiment is the story of Soviet wooing of the Western intelligentsia, focusing on VOKS under Kameneva and Arosev. About a hundred thousand foreigners visited the Soviet Union in the prewar period, many of them left-leaning ...”

“... 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 ...”