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“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... but to consider its significance, both for himself and for his son Jack, whose appetite for sexual conquest replicated his father’s. (Jack claimed he had to have a woman a day, or else he would come down with crippling headaches.) Nearly all their liaisons reflected unequal class relations – a pattern that suggests the sense of entitlement shared by father ...”

“... is up against variant forms from 1766 and 1776; that an injustice may have been done to Sir Robert Walpole (‘All those men have their price’); that ‘It is the first step which counts’ gets its power from the miracle that followed St Denis’s execution – ‘Afterwards he picked up his head and walked for six miles’; that nobody ever quite ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... called by Runciman, but Keegan prefers the probably more authentic Kitbuga) to complete the conquest of the Middle East. So far so good; and fifty years earlier this would have been child’s play for a Mongol army, preceded as it was by a paralysing legend of invincibility. If successful here they might have finished off the Caliphs for good and ...”

“... It offered the vacant throne to William and Mary. What if James returned? Isaac Newton consulted Robert Sawyer, the distinguished lawyer who, with him, represented Cambridge University in the Convention, and received the reassuring advice that to oppose a de facto king, even if on behalf of a lawful king, was treason. But James’s attempt to regain his ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”

“... dependencies in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq and parts of Iran. Thousands died during Ibn Saud’s conquest of the central Arabian peninsula in the first decades of the 20th century; he received a monthly stipend from the British government throughout. When the new Saudi regime was threatened by a rebellion in 1929, British troops helped put down the ...”

“... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...”

“... so much a gesture of accord between Britain and the Indigenous people of Virginia as a symbol of conquest and dominion over the American wilderness and its supposedly savage ways.The Pocahontas story has been avidly fictionalised in novels and films, mostly as a bogus love story between Matoaka and the explorer Captain John Smith. It’s a versatile ...”

“... of course. In their report, the inspectors single out for praise the clerk who attended on them, Robert Aslett, for his unfailing diligence. Aslett later rose to become Second Cashier and was in line for the top job, but he lost thousands on private speculations and stole thousands more in Exchequer bills to cover his losses. He was condemned to death, the ...”

“... a slave-driver’s lash. Scots, in that sense, were the non-commissioned officers of empire; even Robert Burns, a sentimental abolitionist, planned to take a job in Jamaica as an overseer of slaves. The same myth suggested that Gaelic emigrants raised in a clan system had a special rapport with traditional societies. In fact, Highlanders behaved with ...”

“... has declined, so a sturdier population grows to an age where death comes by erosion rather than by conquest, and care of the sick is correspondingly more protracted and expensive. Partly it is the achievement of science in holding that erosion at bay: the technology of soul transplants has not changed much in two millennia (though Americans, as always, find ...”

“... to the central reality of their time: that the Soviet Union was a regime committed to world conquest, ‘a state which, because of the character of its leaders, its ideology and its internal mood, could not have fitted into any design to create a tranquil world’. Ultimately, of course, the West came to its senses and abandoned its futile efforts to ...”

“... alone have the qualities which ensure success.’ The youthful and inexperienced naval officer Robert Scott was taken up by Markham and eventually given the job of reaching the Pole ahead of the suspiciously efficient Norwegian, Amundsen. There was talk of science to seal the legitimacy of the enterprise – meteorology, geomagnetism and mapping – but ...”