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“... The first great Scaliger problem is that of distinguishing between father and son. When Swift, in his Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding, insisted that fiddlers, dancing-masters, heralds and masters of the ceremony were greater pedants ‘than Lipsius, or the elder Scaliger’, there must have been readers who asked themselves whether he wasn’t confusing Julius Caesar Scaliger, one of the 16th century’s most formidable literary scholars, and his son Joseph, who, as it happens, was successor to Lipsius at Leiden ...”

“... all to itself in the National Gallery; but I doubt if anyone has gone into it so pertinaciously as John North. North is an expert in the history of astronomy and mathematics, so naturally his view of the painting emerges from the jumble, which he does not regard as a jumble, of astronomical and time-telling instruments ...”

“... of the Environment – is not very impressive. Just old stones, in no clearly discernible order. John Fowles, in The Enigma of Stonehenge (1980), quotes a child saying worriedly: ‘Why are there so many doors?’ That is how it now seems: a lot of big doorways leading nowhere. Yet it yields some intimidating statistics. Its outer circle and its trilithon ...”

“... in the face of a well-nigh insolvent East India Company and a singularly refractory bunch of North American colonists. His account of these events is excellent. The description of the crisis unfolds elegantly as Christie deftly weaves his way through the intricacies of imperial intrigue. The links between the East Indies and ...”

“... the tea, put the kids to bed while he ended the day down the club ... Miners’ clubs along the north-east coast were the cathedrals of their communities, the space where men had their pleasure and their politics. Their homes, however, remained some of the worst in Britain. Mark Hudson’s Coming Back Brockens – subtitled ‘A Year in a Mining ...”

“... Apart​ from witches, who come here to bury spells, few people visit the British North Gate cemetery in Baghdad. The witches believe that words written on paper and placed in the ground between the graves of non-Muslims, particularly old graves, have enhanced magical powers. North Gate, in the Waziriyah district, is a large quadrilateral of burned grass fringed by palm trees ...”

“... one of the most comprehensive – is the exhibition Life, Art, War at Imperial War Museum North (until 1 January 2018). Its vaguely Vorticist building, which sits beside the Manchester Ship Canal in Trafford, seems like an appropriate setting. Lewis is best known nowadays as the blaster and bombardier of the Vorticist years, but it is clear from this ...”

“... not only for them but for the whole community. Mrs Thatcher has done for Unionists what John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson did for the whites of Alabama in the Sixties. She has stripped them of ascendancy and privilege, and in so doing has done a service to us all – by placing us on a politically equal footing. What Unionists should ...”

“... had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John Donne. However, he allowed Lloyd George to persuade him that a post of such eminence ought rather to be a party appointment. Without doubt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) fitted that bill. He had worked long and hard for the Liberals in his native ...”

“... could transform it for posterity into an earlier version of Dunkirk. ‘To the last,’ writes John North in his 1936 history, it was ‘a singularly brainless and suicidal type of warfare.’ After the worst debacle of all, when General Stopford’s inertia threw away any chance of success in the crucial Allied landings at Suvla Bay, while the ...”

“... a slovenly document which does not even boast an index, starts its story in that year. Col Oliver North, the man who, according to the received version, thought up the idea of selling arms to secure the release of American hostages in Beirut, tells us: ‘My own operational involvement began ... on the afternoon of 17 November 1985.’ The BBC’s Panorama ...”

“... John Lanchester's article in this issue was made up of four posts from his election blog (Smell the Glove / North Korean Flavour / How to Break the System / End of the World ...”

“... sunrise at Stonehenge. How was that image created? The Stonehenge connection goes back to John Aubrey, who first recognised the monuments at Avebury in 1649 and then spent nearly fifty years writing and talking about, but never quite finishing, his projected Templa Druidum. He was followed by William Stukeley, Anglican clergyman and ‘pagan ...”

“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... One of John Osborne’s Thoughts for 1954: ‘The urge to please above all. I don’t have it and can’t achieve it. A small thing but more or less mine own.’ This book does please and has pleased. It is immensely enjoyable, is written with great gusto and Osborne has had better notices for it than for any of his plays since Inadmissible Evidence ...”