“... compatriots. In Rome, Catholic priests formed part of the British colony, the genial Scot Peter Grant being ‘an agreeable companion to everybody’ and the Jesuit John Thorpe acting as an agent for the purchase of works of art. Father Thorpe commissioned paintings and furnishings for the chapel of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, a unique surviving complex of ...”

“... show that the figure and the Don Carlos legend illustrate our broader fascination with trying to grant life to inanimate matter: ‘The monk models in votive intercession or sympathetic repair everything the physicians were trying to accomplish: to prevent the ebbing of life from the body, to rewind its vital spring, to put the prince back on his feet so ...”

“... was loaded in memory and calculate from that the address of ‘commit_creds’, a function used to grant administrator privileges to selected users. The second phase exploited another bug to plant forged data cleverly crafted to be two things at once: an innocent-looking structure that would be handled by a function called the network scheduler, and an illicit ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”

“... Unusual too in a moral philosopher, Williams did not seek to have the Last Word. Writing about Thomas Nagel’s book of that name, he couldn’t but agree that there comes a point at which we have to accept that to encourage thinking locally or ‘thickly’ about ethics, thinking about what the options are for us ‘now and around here’, rests on a ...”

“... He speaks as if he had abolished differences, not just the particular distinction. Even if we grant the thesis that the rapist, the bank robber, the judge, the legislator and the soldier on Tiananmen Square are all exercising force or power, it does not follow that the force of law is simply indistinguishable from the force it opposes, still less that all ...”

“... wages which employers, seeing that they cannot increase prices very rapidly, will be unwilling to grant. Thus Friedman has always advocated a gradual disinflation rather than a short sharp shock. His reasoning lay behind the adoption in 1980 of the British Government’s Medium Term Financial Strategy. Under the MTFS the monetary targets were planned to fall ...”

“... skits, squibs, facetious or satirical articles, jokes, paid for at space rates. Such a poet as Thomas Hood had already squeezed a precarious living from writing or editing ‘comic annuals’, and Punch and its imitators bought the work of innumerable freelances whose hunger enabled them to summon up humour on demand. A third possible source of income was ...”

“... it is further from the immediacy of bloodshed and the living feel of death. Thus we are told that Grant, who conducted war on a ‘balance sheet’ of killing, ‘flinched from the sight of blood and could eat only overdone meat’. It all has to do with the victory of the new men over the old honour, of money over class, of the machine over nature. The ...”

“... Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in ...”

“... annexing Canada.Seward also negotiated a treaty with Denmark to acquire the islands of St Thomas and St John, two of its possessions in the Caribbean. A State Department report of 1868, produced for Seward by the former Mississippi senator and ardent expansionist Robert J. Walker, suggested ‘the propriety of obtaining from the same power ...”

“... echelons of the fashionable Geological Society. They also enabled him to negotiate a government grant to publish the Zoology of the Beagle voyage. A retrenching Whig ministry was persuaded to put up £1000, allowing the young Darwin to dispense his own patronage. He parcelled out his Beagle specimens to white-collar naturalists: to zoological craftsmen like ...”