“... ambition of the Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an overambitious man who had engineered the secession and manipulated his people into supporting him. Many others have repeated this view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe that following the pogroms, or ...”

“... and out again, carrying the Mona Lisa stuffed under his workman’s smock. A police hunt ensued, but despite his criminal record, and despite having left a large thumb-print on the frame, Peruggia’s name never came up. Among those suspected of involvement were Picasso and Apollinaire; the latter was imprisoned briefly, and wrote a poem about ...”

“... and Lleucu Kedy – all probably Welsh – but also with the more English-sounding Margaret Hunt. Another woman in the village, accused of fornication, was named as ‘Gwladus, otherwise Alison’. But this cross-cultural flux was under threat. A few years after the visitation, a legal dispute involving the Welsh nobleman Owain Glyn Dŵr got out of ...”

“... this period there are written chronicles to supplement the archaeology; the Benedictine historian William of Malmesbury tells us that in this case the dangerous dead were malefactors, some excommunicated and others corrupt priests, who had risen from their graves and were seen walking by night, groaning and spreading disease. These two vampire epidemics, as ...”

“... more tenacious, ruthless and monomaniacal. On Wikipedia, it’s the good guys who will hunt you down. Wales thinks this tells us something surprising and reassuring about human nature. ‘Generally we find most people out there on the internet are good,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in Wikipedia that most ...”

“... dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a number of breaches of the Official Secrets Act which ...”

“... out how the popes piped fresh water to their city and sewage away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then ...”

“... so promising – or tantalising – to psychiatrists is, to use the term Michael Pollan takes from William James, their noetic quality. As James described this peculiar aspect of religious experience, ‘People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.’ Psychedelic experience, too, has this ...”

“... in a corporate society. At Harvard, he was, at different times, an assistant and acolyte to William James and George Santayana, and he came to believe that reality was something one had to fight for, that personality and expertise had their parts to play, and that ‘psychology mattered in politics.’ He wanted to see what the papers were saying but ...”

“... where his father farmed nearly two hundred acres, rode to hounds, and with his wife went to hunt balls. Herbert, who for the only time in his life was called Bertie, remembered the period as idyllic when he wrote about the farm, the orchard, the cow pasture and the blacksmith’s shop in the delicate, charming fragment of autobiography The Innocent ...”

“... that the reader is given is filtered through Miriam in a style that Sinclair, borrowing from William James, labelled ‘stream of consciousness’. Richardson loathed the term, calling it a ‘death-dealing metaphor’, but it remains an accurate description of the way in which associations of thoughts and emotions determine the movement of the ...”

“... here in 1990) borrows the form of a Chandleresque detective story for the tale of a hunt for a mutant Manchurian sheep with the ability to inhabit people’s minds. Having possessed (or ‘sheeped’) a soldier in the Imperial Army in the Thirties, it has turned him into an underworld Boss whose extensive outreach includes most of the public ...”

“... later version ‘richer, more complex’, like Jack Stillinger and Zachary Leader; or decide, with William Empson, that it has been mangled ‘for reasons of conscience’? It is not easy to make out what Coleridge thought about the unity of the self, but surely having a sense of it is consistent with occasional changes of mind. His practice suggests that he ...”

“... financial system. The gold standard was finally abandoned, and in 1974, the US Treasury secretary, William Simon, secretly travelled to Saudi Arabia to secure an agreement that remains to this day the foundation of the dollar’s global dominance. As David Spiro has documented in The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony (1999), the US made its guarantees of Saudi ...”

“... of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.’ This is unfair on the likes of William Whewell, the 19th-century British philosopher who gave the name ‘palaetiological sciences’ to disciplines that seek to give explanations, cause by cause, for the changes that occur in the natural and social worlds over time. Whewell thought these ...”