“... response, Edward III set a cap on earnings to protect the nobility. His successor, the 14-year-old Richard II, or whoever was really in charge, went further, introducing a poll tax to pay for the ongoing skirmishes with France. In 1381, a tax collector went to Fobbing in Essex to demand a silver groat from each inhabitant, and was chased away by an angry ...”

“... Summer Holiday (1962), in which, as in successive bus-laden movies, Elborough reminds us, Cliff Richard and the young ones board ‘the wrong bus’, an RT then being easier to buy from London Transport than an RM. During Carnaby Street’s heyday, it appears, any red double-decker with an open platform to sing and caper on would have done the ...”

“... a taste of what it’s like to be a congressman.’ Under these lines was a picture of the rioter Richard Barnett with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. The nationalist blog Guancha claimed that ‘everyone will feel admiration for Wang’s prophecy … Looking at the United States today, it has fallen even further.’ The general feeling was that America ...”

“... take time out to secure the principles of statistics and probability for their work. Steven Rose, criticising Eysenck’s egregious application of techniques of statistical correlation in his work on IQ and race, has said that ‘Eysenck seeks to correlate IQ scores with EEG patterns almost in the manner of a 19th-century phrenologist.’ ‘The ...”

“... several Orientals, people who could have been Mexicans. The drums were struck, a small chant rose to the sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or cultivated ...”

“... rebel was to arts a friend. The friend whose patronage probably led to an attack on Dryden in Rose Alley by hired thugs of Buckingham, the Zimri of the poem, was John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, a moderate royalist who did rather well out of the whole imbroglio. He was the author of An Essay upon Satire and An Essay upon Poetry, in the first of which ...”

“... the consequences. On and on the debate rumbled, until Beatrice Haas, then in her late seventies, rose to rebuke the academics. ‘If I had been with Shelley at Byron’s villa at Este in the spring of 1818,’ she said, ‘I jolly well would have slept with him.’ That seemed to be the end of the matter, but not quite. Marion Stocking summed up with a plea ...”

“... Ahmed was the first to start rolling up his sleeves in readiness for the ritual washing. As we rose his mother said: ‘Why does Allah allow these things to happen? Where’s Allah to help us now?’ Ahmed replied quickly: ‘In the Qu’ran it says we will experience suffering and hardship till the end, we must all remember that.’ She did not look ...”

“... the Prayer Book was demonstrated as much in resistance as in compliance. In 1549, the West Country rose in rebellion against the first of Archbishop Cranmer’s new English liturgies, denouncing it as ‘a Christmas game’. Exeter was besieged, troops were sent against the rebels, half of them foreign mercenaries, many lives were lost, and the ...”

“... Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the Jetty. At some stage in the submersion it must have become a tapering tongue, finally perhaps a mere stub. Smithson, an adventurous character (who was killed when flying a light aircraft to look at one of his works from above), might ...”

“... included 38 staff. In 2014, fewer than 25 staff were included and the department’s GPA rose from 2.4 to 3.1, enough to promote it from twentieth place in the national table to eighth. A bad score can also persuade a university not to bother the next time round: in physics, the number of universities submitting fell from 64 in 1992 to 42 in 2014; in ...”

“... reprised in June). ‘She loved to strip naked and swim in lochs,’ its writer and director, Richard Baron, told the Herald. ‘She didn’t do housework and … she practised free love.’ I guess that’s one way of saying that she was too posh to do the scrubbing (she had a live-in housekeeper, Mary Lawson) and was tight-lipped about her intimate ...”

“... another well-established move for a Swiss hippie – dropped out to become an Alpine herdsman. He rose at four every morning, milking cows, making cheese, learning to weld, lay bricks, keep bees and stitch his own lederhosen. After four years he tired of cows and moved on to sheep. In the mountains he began the diaries, accompanied by beautiful and meticulous ...”

“... characters, without situations.’ That is what a certain tradition of philosophy does. But when Richard Rorty describes philosophy as turning to narrative and the imagination, pointing us towards solidarity through ‘the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’, we seem close to Kundera’s work, and to much traditional thinking ...”

“... for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of ...”