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“... was a revolution that perpetuated something of what it appeared to reject. It seems unlikely, as Dennis Sharp writes in his introduction, that without Muthesius Gropius would have brought such a Morrisian view of craft to the Bauhaus or that ‘the idea of a utopian cathedral of socialism built on principles of medieval Masonic guilds’ would have ...”

“... In these essays Rogers alerts us to niceties and implications we might have missed. He has a sharp eye for selecting passages that richly illustrate his assertions, such as the following lines from the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot: Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill; I wish’d the man a dinner, and sate still: Yet then did ...”

“... there but only occasionally glimpsed. The glimpses are instructive. In 1937 the diplomat Geoffrey Dennis wrote a Coronation Commentary for Heinemann. This was a reasoned defence of the monarchy – then in a very rocky state. Dennis repeated, and deprecated, the widespread gossip that Mrs Simpson had been the Duke of ...”

“... it survived its infancy largely thanks to Bernard Shaw’s reputation and money, that Clifford Sharp, the editor, was an alcoholic and possibly a spy, and that the paper itself was deadly dull. The only previous extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the ...”

“... seems, all this came as a great surprise, yet there was nothing very remarkable in the voters’ sharp reaction to record unemployment, broken promises and Presidential arrogance, particularly in a country where the most deeply felt political sentiment has always been the wish to ‘sortir les sortants’ – to throw out whoever’s in power. The British ...”

“... roles and old man’s roles’. The first claim is at best debatable, the other two simply wrong. Dennis Kay’s biography is altogether more respectable. He has only a dozen pages of notes, but they direct readers to major sources and divergent views. He has not closed his eyes and swallowed everything done in the last decade; but he hasn’t closed his eyes ...”

“... I can come out at any time without notice’. The desiderated situation resembles that of the sharp-eyed, voyeuristic and invisible narrators of Hardy’s fictions, and in a rather different sense ‘coming out without notice’ is what the letters offer in their best moments. There are letters (like Keats’s) that belong to literature, and letters (like ...”

“... detailed, intelligently constructed indexes, whose makers he always warmly thanked.The index, as Dennis Duncan shows in Index, A History of the, has been around for a long time. Its roots stretch back to inventories, catalogues and the tags that identified scrolls, such as those of the Alexandrian Library, to tables of contents, which Pliny the Elder and ...”

“... a book called The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works.When Lieutenant Colonel Sharp’s book was announced, one person on Twitter commented: ‘Thumbing through my copy of The Habit of Excellence – Why Wehrmacht Leadership Works (Berlin, 1945). Copy has suffered some fire and water damage.’ On the home front, this is an institution in ...”

“... think about resigning from the Government in protest. All his most reliable political friends – Dennis Skinner, Audrey Wise, Ken Coates, most of the activists in his Bristol constituency, even his son Stephen – advised him to do so. Benn’s own belief, often expressed here, that the power and influence that mattered came from below, from the shop ...”

“... of revenge taken by Cheeta’. However, those expecting a contemporary version of Patrick Dennis and Cris Alexander’s fabulous spoof, Little Me (1961), the life of Belle Poitrine, will be disappointed. Poitrine’s memoir is pure absurdity, but gives a more accurate insight into the tone of the period. It helped perhaps that she was a fictional ...”

“... Trynka writes with studied understatement, ‘no detailed memories of the household antics of Dennis Hopper, Iggy Pop and David Bowie survive, for each of the participants’ recollection of this period is patchy.’ It seems that Bowie probably did have an exorcism carried out on his house, but ‘other tales, including the one of David storing bodily ...”

“... art have offered us two different Hogarths, with about as much in common as Michael Howard and Dennis Skinner. One of them is described by David Solkin in his Painting for Money, reviewed in these pages last year by Ronald Paulson. Solkin’s Hogarth is an ambitious social climber, determined to efface the memory of his beginnings as an apprentice in the ...”

“... certain reputation, occasional brushes with high life and lengthy diaries and letters filled with sharp gossip about your famous friends; and Waugh has the advantage that he is still widely read. Penguin keeps all the novels in print, though none of the biographies. Reluctant to give all the details, they allow that Decline and Fall is the top seller at about ...”

“... appealing to democratic values. The Nationalists themselves – now better led than before, by the sharp accountant Alex Salmond and his more histrionic and rhetorically talented deputy, Jim Sillars – appeal at least in part to the proposition that a historically constituted nation held to be suffering in its relations with the dominant sector of the ...”