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“... those failed politicians, Philip and Algernon. The biographies by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Scott are explicitly concerned to get behind the legends. Philip has been mythologised as the model Renaissance and Protestant courtier, whose courage and heroism led to a tragic early death at the battle of Zutphen in 1586. Algernon has been ...”

“... one of its chief glories. When Algernon Sidney, the 17th-century republican who is the subject of Jonathan Scott’s biographical study, sought to incite insurrection against Charles II, and invoked the rights of ‘the nobility and people’, he made plain his assumption that the people would naturally do what the nobility told them. The assumption may ...”

“... Historians have fought so savagely over its causes and consequences that in 2000 the academic Jonathan Scott observed that ‘the battlefields of the 17th century … are becoming increasingly hard to see under the great piles of bleached bones left by historians murdered by their colleagues.’ It might help if we knew where the original bodies were ...”

“... to reinstate the English Revolution as a branch of the Thirty Years War is sometimes extravagant, Jonathan Scott has a point when he argues that the true context of the Stuart crisis was not British but European, in the sense that Continental interference, climaxing in the Dutch invasion in 1688-9, clinched a process of state-formation which the civil ...”

“... of travelling to India was that one’s body would be transformed by these hot elements. Edmund Scott’s An Exact Discourse of the … East Indians (1606) is an early exercise in ethnography written for the then fledgling East India Company. But as well as describing ‘Java Major, with the manners and fashions of the people’, ...”

“... of floods). He didn’t get away with it. Sixty years ago, Kenneth Haworth removed George Gilbert Scott’s reredos and transparent iron screen from the chancel. He did get away with it. Pevsner wrote that it was ‘a crime against the tenets of the Victorian Society but the need of the 13th-century cathedral was indeed greater than theirs’. Orbach ...”

“... One evening, declares Jonathan Wordsworth as he begins his new critical book, a poet happened to be walking along a road, when the peasant who was with him pointed out a striking sight:         ’Twas a horse, that stood Alone upon a little breast of ground With a clear silver moonlight sky behind. With one leg from the ground the creature stood, Insensible and still; breath, motion gone, Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone, Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... beginning, middle and end – and as such it could be judged in advance as an aesthetic totality. Jonathan Strauss, in Subjects of Terror, argues that during the French Revolution, the guillotine was always late for a death that had already happened; the period between condemnation and the fall of the blade was a twilight of the walking dead. Jade’s final ...”

“... couplets evoke Ogden Nash rather than Pope, and he could learn a thing or two about humour from Scott Bradfield, who at any rate (on the basis of his story ‘Sweet ladies, good night, good night’) knows how to manufacture a few Woody Allenish wisecracks. ‘I was audited by scientologists and believe it was the most profound, unforgettable experience of ...”

“... a new location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’Denise Scott Brown, overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri ...”

“... weapons in the Ministry of Defence and was now a director of James’s own company, BMARC, as was Jonathan Aitken who had close links to the Saudi Royal Family, and Stefanus Adolphus Kock, a leading British intelligence agent and Midland Bank consultant whose business was arms sales. At the time none of this worried James very much. ‘You got the ...”

“... examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common ...”

“... Manuel Rivas writes in Galician, the least known of Spain’s official languages. Franco’s repression of the four regional languages ended up doing a great deal to stimulate their revival, and Rivas chooses to write in Galician even if not all his characters would have spoken it, even if it means his work’s literary life will be led mostly in translation ...”

“... wars on pointless subjects; straight-faced manuals of advice on behaving badly. For Walter Scott, his shrewdest 19th-century reader, Swift ‘possessed the faculty of transfusing his own soul into the body of anyone whom he selected’. His lifelong preference was to write under assumed identities – Isaac Bickerstaff or Lemuel Gulliver; the bumptious ...”