“... Laon case seems to have been a direct model for both the others. The precise mixture of neurosis, self-deception and outright fraud in each case cannot be exactly reconstructed, but all these elements were certainly present among the demoniacs and their entourages. The possession of Marthe Brossier was much the most significant, timed as it was to coincide ...”

“... coulisses of Argentine politics, and can fairly be called a participant as well as a commentator. Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald, who writes with the authority of a fellow editor whose support for Timerman never wavered, says that ‘La Opinion gave lukewarm support for human rights and ... maintained weathervane policies according to the views of ...”

“... Casaubon in Middlemarch; Mrs Humphry Ward gave a vivid picture of Pattison as Squire Wendover in Robert Elsmere, a Victorian best-seller; and Rhoda Broughton, the novelist who knew the Rector best, produced a cruel portrait in her slight and perfunctory novel Belinda. But this, alas, only illustrates the force of Henry James’s passionate statement to a ...”

“... United States. It was a year of political disaster. Nixon became President; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated. But for Dummett things were even worse at home. He was ‘deeply involved in work to combat that racism which has, over the past fifteen years, disfigured our national life and dishonoured our country’, and in 1967 the ...”

“... cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic depression and self-loathing. That kind of behaviour is surely evidence more of emotional turmoil. The world of Edwardian leftish journalism inhabited by Sharp was dominated by two opposed currents. A clutch of Liberal papers, headed by the Nation and the Westminster ...”

“... visits to 37 St Giles and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations ...”

“... She may think of herself as an outsider to a certain kind of feminism, to the marketing of ‘self-care’, to the relentless insistence on empowerment, transformation, healing and sharing. The thought of posting online with a hashtag repels her. She may have had friendships or relationships with questionable men, but she would take no satisfaction in ...”

“... is now enshrined by the 2018 Basic Law. In the words of the law, ‘the right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ (Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, put it more bluntly in 2012: ‘This land is Jewish, it is not for the Arabs. There is no place here for the Arabs, and there will be no place for ...”

“... Their resolve fortified by the sturdy civic virtue of Cato and Brutus, and their idea of republican self-government indebted to Greco-Roman models, the founders of American independence deferred to the authority of the ancients, even as they embarked on a revolutionary political experiment. George Washington, for example, identified himself with Cato of Utica, whom the 18th-century British knew best through the medium of Addison’s popular tragedy Cato (1713 ...”

“... On the morning of 30 April 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, head of the British Meteorological Department, slit his throat. Because Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some historians have chalked up his suicide to guilt over his unwitting complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested ...”

“... a majority are MSM – men who have sex with men. So, although syphilis is a shadow of its former self, it has not gone away, just like another ‘old’ pathogen, tuberculosis, the decline of which has been reversed since HIV began turning off immune systems and drug-resistant mutants were encouraged by poorly administered therapy. Forgetting about ...”

“... 1950, the notion that cities such as London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff were not in principle self-governing, or that local authorities existed to administer nationally determined policy, would hardly have surfaced. And yet by the 1920s, where costly services such as public education were concerned, the balance between money raised on the rates and grants ...”

“... seemed to feel entitled to the world’s gratitude. ‘Because I am blessed by my good brain,’ Robert Horton, one of Browne’s predecessors, boasted, ‘I tend to get the right answer rather quicker and more often than most people.’ It’s not difficult to imagine Hayward saying something similar. He committed gaffe after gaffe – denying ...”

“... original publisher withdrew, and the judges quit in protest over his treatment. One of them was Robert Lowell, whom Seidel had interviewed for the Paris Review the previous year. Final Solutions, which was eventually published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”