“... most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast and saw his ...”

“... rugby based on kicking for three-quarters of a game suddenly throwing the ball around the field as though it were a hot potato. What they are doing is throwing away their principles, too, because if you believe in a kicking game, then adhere to that. Don’t just switch to a totally different style only because you are behind and in trouble. What sort ...”

“... long-term beneficiary: the Olympic Stadium is being remodelled as the Braves’ new baseball field. In making money from the Olympics, the Braves are being faithful to the spirit that built modern Atlanta. Calling itself the capital of the New South, and with a phoenix on its seal, Atlanta saw itself as a commercial and industrial centre that had risen ...”

“... to create is played out. His findings are damning. On 5 October 1965, as the massacres began, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Jakarta, told the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ On the following day, the Foreign Office in ...”

“... believe that what they did was much of a crime, given how much bad behaviour on the cricket field goes unpunished. Warne tends to agree with them. Many other players – from Michael Atherton to Sachin Tendulkar – have been accused of messing around with the ball and got away with it. Some, like the South Africans Faf du Plessis and Vernon ...”

“... the quantities of the seasonings were wrong – no quantities are given in Apicius, so I consulted Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger’s Classical Cookbook (1996) – but whatever the amount, the food would have seemed weird to our untrained stomachs. The later Romans, we thought, as we gargled with fizzy water to take the taste away, must have had very odd ...”

“... most cerebral of political thinkers was thus ultimately driven by his gut instincts,’ Andrew Roberts argues, pointing not only to Powell’s patriotism but to his religious faith. Scruton identifies the ‘sacramental function’ Powell gives to words, citing a characteristic declaration that ‘a bill becomes a law because certain words of Norman ...”

“... day is a fine day and an unqualified good. It’s a day free of things that need doing, an open field of possibility, and it brings to mind ethical qualities such as truth and directness (we say of people that they are ‘honest as the day is long’, of things that they are ‘as clear as daylight’). For Martin herself, the grid was the foundation of her ...”

“... slaves who had fought under him, this early gesture towards restitution was ended by President Andrew Johnson in 1869 and has been the subject of bitter jokes ever since. Looters in urban riots a century later claimed their loot was their 40 acres, promising to ‘be back for the mules’. In relation to other claims, Barkan stresses that the amount of ...”

“... the summer. Of the two English players bought in the IPL slave auctions for over £1 million each, Andrew Flintoff is injured – he might not be able to play in the remaining tests against the West Indies, but can’t afford to miss the IPL – and Pietersen is sulking, having lost the Stanford dosh. So he’ll go to India and pocket the million. Were he ...”

“... In 1892 A.C. Benson published an essay which introduced the modern appreciation of Andrew Marvell. For more than two hundred years Marvell’s verse had shared with Metaphysical poetry a lowness of esteem which now seems puzzling. As the Cyclopaedia of English Literature explained in 1844, Marvel ‘is better known as a prose writer than a poet, and is still more celebrated as a patriotic member of parliament ...”

“... before, but never so beautifully as in the opening poem about butterflies over a strawberry field: For a week they came lighting on our favoured blooms, as detachable as earrings ... Such description doesn’t help us to know Katerina, and the recalcitrant reader may feel that, having invented a persona, Reid should have given us more to go on: like ...”

“... in medical and technological history in particular – at which it has made its fatal entrance. Andrew Nikiforuk, a Canadian journalist, argues in The Fourth Horseman that Aids is not as different as we suppose. The pandemic is driven by a familiar conjunction of economic and biological circumstances, which he refers to as the ‘dismal economies of ...”

“... of governments is the way he likes to see himself, with more than a little vanity. ‘In the whole field of investigative journalism,’ he writes, ‘there is little that is more satisfying than triumphing, publicly, over a great department of state and its civil service mandarins and senior politicians with whom one has been in open conflict.’ In an essay ...”

“... King: a forger who could read Coptic, perhaps, but not write it without a crib. Another scholar, Andrew Bernhard, found a candidate for that crib: an interlinear translation of the Thomas gospel with idiosyncrasies that not only accounted for the mangled syntax of the fragment’s sixth line, but also replicated a missing letter in its first.King was careful ...”