“... by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe used such homely drugs as belladonna, henbane and mandrake, both in their role as crypto-medical ‘wise-women’ – the atrophine in ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... their first confrontation and defeated the Islamists in Konna. But on the night of 16 January, a major gas production site at the Algerian-Libyan border, near In Amenas, was taken over by al-Mulathameen (‘the masked brigade’), an Islamist katiba (or ‘fighting unit’) based in Mali which had decided to make a response, and perhaps to signal to rival ...”

“... in storage and taps (on occasion) the emails and internet activity of the customers of nine major companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft. The major difference from the Cheney machinery seems to be that general warrants are now dealt out, rather than no warrants at all, but general warrants don’t meet the ...”

“... of short selling. In 2008 Rowan Williams spoke out against it, and his fellow archbishop John Sentamu compared short sellers to ‘bank robbers’. (In the event it transpired that the Church of England’s pension fund had been earning fees for lending out its holdings of shares to short sellers.) Being denounced by an archbishop isn’t the worst ...”

“... within range of Soviet counter-strikes while the US was not, and Britain in particular harboured major US bases. This anxiety remained central for British policy-makers even once the Soviets had got the bomb, as they still lacked the means to use it against the US. On the one hand, this situation sent British governments chasing the chimera of civilian ...”

“... West and the rest came in the second quarter of the 19th century. It was only at this point that major disparities emerged between the sites of Western and Asiatic ‘industrious revolutions’. Nineteenth-century Western traders spurned the once popular artisan products of Asia and the Middle East in favour of agricultural produce; while indigenous ...”

“... though with notable exceptions, like the superb movie still of Greta Garbo in The Kiss. The major turning-point is Romney’s ‘Portrait of Lady Hamilton as Circe’. His sexual infatuation with his model is so intense and palpable as to define a tradition that continues unbroken down to the latest Playboy centrefold: the loosened hair, the eyes set in ...”

“... than mediocre intelligence’ – but, apart from a general desire to belittle female musicians, a major concern was the effect singing church music might have on young men. A.H. Peppin wrote as late as 1927 that one music master he had recently interviewed suspected that ‘a great many of the boys and a good many of the masters’ regarded music with ...”

“... are emblems of nobility and knighthood such as money cannot, traditionally, buy. There is one major claim in Alpers’s book that I have not yet mentioned. It is that ‘Rembrandt contrived to see or at least to represent life as if it were a studio event’ – a ‘studio event’ implying for her a piece of improvised theatre. Quasi-theatrical events ...”

“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... it does at the end of history rather than at the beginning. This brings us to Runciman’s third major theme, which is how the confrontation between Hobbesian/Roman and Gierkean/German ideas worked itself out in the theories of the English Pluralists. F.W. Maitland’s dislike of the Hobbesian model may well have antedated his acquaintance with Gierke ...”

“... powerful committees – Appropriations, Foreign Relations and Finance – while of the 13 other major committees only one was not chaired by a Southerner or a firm ally of the South. On the most powerful committee of all, Appropriations, over half the Democrats were Southerners, who also provided the chairmen of six of the ten sub-committees. This, together ...”

“... DM2.95 which, within two years, was inflicting great damage on the economy. Yet politically, the Major government was bound hand and foot to its existing policy – and Labour’s only criticism was that the policy did not go far enough. That was the position at the time of the general election in April 1992, at which ...”