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“... gang up on their targets. Phillips details the case of a Californian teenager called Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February 2010. Her relatives were treated as fair game, and supportive strangers who tried to intervene were themselves tracked down and hounded. RIP trolling treats grief as an exploitable state. It isn’t that the trolls ...”

“... at Çayönü in Turkey. A mass of bodies, primarily infants, are currently being excavated by Roger and Wendy Matthews of the University of Reading from a single building at the early Neolithic site of Bestansur in northern Iraq. Signs of multiple burials have been found below house floors in late Neolithic sites throughout the region. Many Neolithic ...”

“... Tybalt, I have myself always assumed that since Mercutio with cheerful derision calls his enemy ‘King of Cats’, ‘Prince of Cats’, making allusion to rat-catching and the possession of nine lives; and since furthermore Elizabethans appear to have called their Tom-cats, Tib-cats – then the chances are strong that our still-surviving habit of calling ...”

“... self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former puerile fantasies./No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great.’ In one of its most lyrical passages, the poem becomes a hymn tothose who could harness neither steam nor electricitythose who explored neither the ...”

“... knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside holidays and an ...”

“... her, we see him, out of focus, emerge from the dust of the bomb-blast. The shot is well framed – Roger Pratt deserves his Oscar nomination for cinematography – and the scene is much the most powerful in the film. It almost makes Michael Nyman’s hyperbolic score (the music in Planet of the Apes is subtle by comparison) tolerable. In all such scenes of ...”

“... on Eliot’s imagination, but has always claimed to like the sonnet ‘Idylls of the King’ which provoked all the London Review controversy, and he reprints it here. It is terrifying to imagine what he might say about a poem he really disliked: he has accused it of being rhythmically inert and simplistically nostalgic for a Christian past ...”

“... standards in public life, a member of the Commission, MacGregor’s former cabinet colleague Tom King, signalled his approach to MacGregor’s conduct with the memorable sentence: ‘I will embarrass you now by saying I always thought you should be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ MacGregor’s antics were governed by the prevailing Parliamentary ethic during ...”

“... for his deeply religious mother there was never any doubt: he was chosen, blessed, her own golden king. All through the pregnancy, Gladys Presley had attended her local Baptist church, the Tabernacle of the Assembly of God. This was a Pentecostal faith in which the happy ordeal of being born again was called the ‘burning love’; speaking in tongues was ...”

“... was probably acquired from a Cockney immigration officer), he was a subject of King George V, and therefore, as he spent a lifetime explaining to interviewers, not a refugee. ‘After the excitements of Berlin, Britain was inevitably a comedown,’ Hobsbawm remembered. ‘Nothing in London had the emotional charge of those ...”

“... his son Gamal to succeed him. His reign was thus an instance of both the wider phenomena that Roger Owen discusses in exemplary depth: the rise of ‘presidents for life’ in the Arab world and these leaders’ tendency – or at least the temptation – to try to secure the presidency for their families by instituting a dynastic succession. Mubarak ...”

“... walking into the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the US Capitol still pass a bust of Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that black people could not be American citizens since they had always been ‘regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race ...”

“... wants to destroy you.’ The trouble was, as Foccart admits, that Gaullist Interior Ministers – Roger Frey, for example – had exactly the same view of him but always got a flea in the ear when they complained to de Gaulle that Foccart was running a vast secret intelligence net parallel to their own. Pompidou defeated Poher in the election and Foccart ...”

“... for New Society, a violence pundit. He got everything that was coming to him: he was played by Roger Daltrey. But the real clincher, as far as Reg was concerned, came with the last rites for his mother Violet. ‘Last but not least, when he attended my mother’s funeral in the role of reporter, he did not wear a tie. He was never a true villain.’ The ...”

“... Pearse himself: he had suggested inviting Prince Joachim, younger son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to be King of Ireland. It is fascinating to think that German might now be one of Ireland’s official languages, along with English and Irish. How complicated are the affairs of even the smallest nations. Roy Foster is one of the finest contemporary Irish ...”