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“... During the​ 1950s and 1960s, a generation of academics rose to prominence in the United States with books and essays that breached the wall separating the university and the broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr ...”

“... had known as The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of York and All Is True, for example, reappeared as, respectively, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 and Henry VIII.) Pre-Christian British kings, however, though just as solemnly vouched for by Holinshed’s Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as ...”

“... and students who have contributed to the handsome volume in his honour. Their essays range from Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s philosophical investigation into aspects of meaning in Mozart’s last three symphonies to James McKinnon’s critique of the myth of the Phrygian aulos, the instrument whose exciting and sensuous sound was supposedly rejected on ...”

“... Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole enterprise, I do think, is compromised by those gestures towards ‘the English Spirit’, ‘the making of a tradition’ etc. (They come thickest, it is true, in the ...”

“... a long battle between Tower Hamlets Council and the Smithsons’ admirers, who include Hadid and Richard Rogers, the estate is currently being demolished. Alison Smithson died in 1993. Her husband survived her, but she had always been the dominant partner and much of the cult status the Smithsons now enjoy is owed to her. With her dark matryoshka doll ...”

“... Jones was never exactly poor: his father was a real self-made man, a brilliant mathematician who rose from charity school in Llanfechell to become vice-president of the Royal Society (introducing ‘pi’ in its modern meaning along the way). But he died before his son’s third birthday, and Jones started life with only a modest bequest. Tutoring Althorp ...”

“... and for a while housed such diverse inhabitants as McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Paul and Jane Bowles and Richard Wright. (Auden seems to have been an especially terrible housemate, complaining about excessive use of toilet paper and telling people their colds weren’t physical but ...”

“... to read and hear almost every message that passes between us. In his new history of GCHQ Richard Aldrich claims that this surveillance capability constitutes potentially ‘the most insidious threat to personal liberty’ we face today. Bentham’s panopticon was a fiction. The Victorians who came after him would never have permitted anything like ...”

“... the visitor who delights in the first also thrills, secretly, to the second. In Blood in the City, Richard Burton takes his readers on a walking tour of Parisian sacrifice and slaughter. He moves from the Bastille to the place de la Concorde (where Louis XVI was executed), to the Hôtel de Ville (where successive generations of revolutionaries raised the flag ...”

“... some purpose, Willy told us the whole story of his life so that we should realise that he rose from the ranks, and so far has made no money, so isn’t marriageable. This made clear, he can let himself go and is having great fun. I believe that he has more character than appears.” ’ The whole truth is unlikely to have been told about Willy’s ...”

“... to play them. From this small start, a Bohemian school of horn-playing burgeoned. As Sporck rose in the world, he advanced the cause of music in Bohemia, importing an opera company from Vienna and building up a horn ensemble of legendary powers. Bohemian players became so skilful that they travelled to France, not to learn, but to play. German makers ...”

“... to fix an order upon it. The Duke’s vision is fancier:        And there In tiers of rose and grey will rise A wedding of Greece and China From which the landscape seems to fall As stair by stair turns round … But even the conscious muddle of tenses cannot disguise the inevitable futureness of the project. The transcendent work of art must ...”

“... to challenge the sentimental and moralistic pictures of working-class community associated with Richard Hoggart, Jeremy Seabrook and Steedman’s particular mentor, Raymond Williams. The childhood Steedman described was not cosy and hospitable but lonely, introverted and largely joyless. Her mother, a Lancashire weaver’s daughter, had fought against ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge ...”

“... denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own interpretations. In Norris’s ...”