“... was seamed with cracks into which ‘wedges’ could be driven. The Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote 20 years ago that American statesmen in the postwar period never ‘believed in the existence of an international Communist monolith’. After reading Selverstone’s work, it would be hard to accept that judgment. But at almost all times ...”

“... sped him and 15,000 Dutch soldiers to Torbay on the auspicious date of 5 November; but he also took care to smooth the path of providence by means of a web of alliances with dissident members of the British ruling class. Some time before the invasion William altered his mission from policy change to regime change: he now intended to take the throne for ...”

“... the very depths’ but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all he took it – this was in 1971 – as just one more instance of what he saw as happening to the study of language and literature everywhere: the human stakes were being removed, words were playing among themselves, no agents or intentions were to be seen.And yet ...”

“... best-known Committee on Social Thought (established with family money by the economic historian John Nef), are tiny departments cutting across disciplinary specialism and empowered in certain cases to award undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Hutchins’s Committee on the Liberal Arts was financed from the outside and was used by him to publicise his ...”

“... bestiality has been, and remains, a lot more common than most of us think. He explains how it took place in the past. In the cavalry, for instance, ‘with such an intimate bond between horse and rider’, and with women scarce and horses freely available, it naturally occurred to some officers that there was more than one useful way to mount a horse ...”

“... she regarded as frivolous, insisting on balls and parties which exhausted their menfolk and took them away from their work. ‘It is the wives – confound them,’ she wrote. ‘They take no sort of interest in what is going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from ...”

“... forbidding sea towards new land’. Perhaps the strangest thing about Duncan’s dream is that it took him so long to think it strange. Though he’d write, as an adult, that the dream-vision of field and cave remained an ‘emblematic and puzzling’ motivator of his poetry, as a child he wasn’t puzzled at all. His adoptive parents, a public-works ...”

“... The 17th-century antiquary John Selden spent his life deciphering Greek inscriptions and interpreting Near Eastern myths. No scholar of his time had more experience with the historical study of material remains; no one knew better how easily a modern intellectual can read too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the techniques with which Italian Renaissance artists analysed and represented the natural world: the science of art, as he once called it ...”

“... one that should be asked only once in the history of literature, then shelved. Sterne pretty well took care of the issue with Tristram Shandy, since when it has become the clunkiest way of expressing the central doubt of human experience. It begins to look like an insult to the intelligence of an audience, who, having, as Potter scoffed in a New Society ...”

“... the elderly and the sick for transit. The doctor’s submission details many abuses which took place there, including rape and beatings. It also states that the staff at the camp clinic kept records on the patients. Circumventing camp regulations, they used a code to signal that a patient had been mistreated. ‘Several times,’ the submission goes ...”

“... of Trump in 2016. The new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the national security adviser, John Bolton, are believers in US force projection whose appetite for wars can only frustrate Trump’s announced purpose to withdraw from the wars we are already in. The extent to which this president understands so basic a fact about a government he nominally ...”

“... among them. The case against Cecil has recently been revived by Alford’s former supervisor, John Guy, in his biography of Mary, My Heart is my Own (2004). Any subsequent biographer is forced to address Guy’s case against Cecil. Alford has not done so explicitly, but he has accepted some of Guy’s charges, while others are either ignored or treated ...”

“... golden age, and it is certainly a picture which would have been unrecognisable to the bishops who took office in 1559. The 1559 Prayer Book was a little like the Highway Code: it was recognised as a touchstone of orthodoxy, but those who used the confession and absolution set out in the visitation of the sick may have been as rare as those who make hand ...”

“... and so does any theory you construct from it. In Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy opens up a startling new angle on certain secret operations of the mid-1580s. If he is right, he has blown an extraordinarily effective cover, which had everyone fooled at the time and has survived intact for four centuries. Some of the links in his ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”