“... in Sudan and the fighting in Chad. What Women Do in Wartime presents a convincing analysis of the broad conditions which underpin much of this civil strife. It points to the fiscal regime imposed on much of Africa by the IMF and the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programmes – these on top of the burden of existing debt repayment. At the same ...”

“... against the quiet obscurity that satisfied Emily Dickinson, her near contemporary. She married Richard Stoddard, a fervent would-be poet who was never to falter in his support of her aspirations, moved to New York, and cultivated bookish acquaintances. Money was always short, largely because she spent more than she earned. Much of her writing was directed ...”

“... his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to penalise subjects for treason that consisted purely of loyalty to the eventual loser. It remains in force. In 1662 it was ...”

“... CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could be pardoned for hoping that a reorientation of policy was underway.But almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... not alone in finding Banks a study in vanity: an intellectual flea Hopping on Science’s broad, bony back. Although Banks did much to promote the international image of the Royal Society during his 42-year tenure as its President, he seems incorrectly to have understood the underlying forces encouraging specialisation. He supported the formation of ...”

“... on sources: ‘masterly’, ‘magnificent’ and ‘magisterial’ are among his adjectives for a broad and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious controversialists, of writers on science and medicine and so on, whose names were then ...”

“... written only just before Julius Caesar). Kermode suggests that the prison scene at the end of Richard II marks a stage in the emergence of characters who think in verse, and shows ‘signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges’, and that in Henry IV Shakespeare comes to understand and develop the potential of prose. But if ...”

“... have tended to achieve popular success by side-stepping party politics and establishing a broad base of support, not only across the parties, but from people who don’t think of themselves as having a political affiliation at all. Richard Daley Jr, Mayor of Chicago and son of ...”

“... hitherto dismissed. He pays no attention to Trilling and blessedly little to Spender. He follows Richard Hillary’s much-mentioned The Last Enemy to Mary and Richard (1988), a collection of love letters between Hillary and Mary Booker edited by Michael Burn, later to become Mary’s husband; this leads him to Burn’s own ...”

“... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...”

“... with atheism, libertinism and violent revolution. Openly atheistic tracts by such agitators as Richard Carlile were sold under the counter and were often written from prison. As Secord observes, such works ‘had long been available to the wealthy and discreet, and were sold in much the same way (and sometimes through the same channels) as ...”