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“... is the Great Fear of witches that manifested itself so widely. Grave theologians and stern lawyers, the learned King James I and the even more learned lawyer Jean Bodin raised on fragile pilings of fact a towering structure of Monty-Pythonish inferences. Europeans who knew that every village had always had its ...”

“... Underground, Konwicki meets the beautiful Russian Nadezhda (or Hope), framed by pictures of ‘the stern and bearded faces of the Russian dissidents’. The unwearying identification of things Russian is comic in itself, and further comedy comes from the way they have been shamelessly substituted for Polish things, their grisly virtue, their scale, their ...”

“... Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic ...”

“... and psychological consequences of the collapse of the old order’, as the Highland historian James Hunter put it). I prefer to think of it as a revolution in feeling. It absorbed the unfathomable excitements and terrors of a turbulent age, of displacement and famine and emigration and landlessness. Before the Disruption, it was led not by ministers but ...”

“... Iran, a minority in the house of Islam, had rewritten the script of revolution in the Middle East. James Buchan’s Days of God shows how a radicalised clergy took control of a popular uprising against a Western-backed dictator and set up the world’s first and only Islamic republic. Buchan tells that story as well as anyone has done, but Days of God is also ...”

“... and poetic traditions of the earlier 18th century, especially the philologist-philosopher James Harris and the poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons. Actually, it might be truer to say that Barbauld’s most remarkable achievement was to complicate the tenor of most Unitarian writing by including stuff that its ...”

“... never meant, or thought they were never meant, to end up. The inspector of this sad parade, its stern adjudicator, is well placed to show where each unhappy man fell short, for he is himself a kind of failure, a rare kind: the failed failure, the exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen ...”

“... Proust, Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare and certain Latin poets (Martial, Horace). Of the King James version of the Bible, he said: ‘It’s frightfully good.’ Early on he praised the work of Derek Walcott, who had once been a friend of his, and recited a whole poem, ‘As John to Patmos’, from memory. But later he rubbished him, and Walcott replied ...”

“... growth of tension between court and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in ...”

“... opened fire on the protesters, leaving 69 dead and 189 injured. In his essay for this new edition, James Sanders suggests that the fate of Eersterust ‘would have taught [Cole] that the struggle with apartheid can never be a fair contest. To resist one had to learn to cheat.’ The Sharpeville massacre, which took place on Cole’s twentieth birthday, may ...”

“... gleaming, double-edged thing: both a brisk appreciation of Cather’s artistic achievement and a stern, even cutting assault on modern Cather scholarship. It grows out of a controversial article that Acocella, a well-known dance critic, published in the New Yorker in 1995. The original article was a fairly devastating attack on the various ways in which ...”

“... his discovery that there were only 1,440 Jews in all of Palestine is not mentioned. The Reverend James Parkes is cited many times, but his evidence that the Jewish population of Jerusalem was less than a thousand in 1827, or that it formed only a third of its inhabitants by mid-century, is left out.For all her ‘bald facts’, Peters only manages to prove ...”

“... the deck in case the severed cable whiplashed back. The gunboat swept past tight across their stern, the cable went slack, and their net and all the fish it contained sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.Soon afterwards, in 1976, under pressure from the United States and Britain’s military chiefs, who took seriously Iceland’s threats to opt out of the ...”

“... is taken via love. Drubbed and disabused, Villon spices the miseries of the rejected lover with stern maledictions against the woman in question (‘A time will come that will quite desiccate,/ Yellow and wither that full-blown flower of yours’). He consigns his erstwhile partner to the attentions of a celebrated lecher known as ‘le Bon ...”

“... with and contains the figure of evil genius who aims for total control of our lives. In early James Bond movies, the evil genius was an eccentric figure, dressed extravagantly, or alternatively, in the grey uniform of the Maoist commissar. In the case of Gates, this ridiculous charade is no longer needed – the evil genius turns out to be the boy next ...”