“... the handmaiden of politics and can play the game, in many cases, even better than the world powers. The Rwandan militia leader Bosco Ntaganda, known as the Terminator and wanted for his activities near a major goldmine in eastern Congo, was finally handed over for a cloak-and-dagger arrest by the ICC in Kigali in 2013. No voices in Africa could be heard ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... annexation of Bosnia that year infuriated Serbian nationalists, who felt betrayed by the European powers and in particular by Russia, which allowed it to happen. In 1912-13, Serbia invaded Albania, to whose independence Austria was committed. Its soldiers murdered three hundred Gostivar Muslims and threw them into mass graves; hundreds more were killed in ...”

“... After the Reformation, ‘maumet’ began to be used as a derogatory epithet for Catholic idols: Thomas Becon, for example, complains of ‘antichristian monsters’ who teach people ‘to run a Pilgrimage to this and that Idol, to paint this tabernacle, and to gild that maumet’. The Island Princess’s ‘maumet gods’ would have registered as an ...”

“... celebration of art’s ‘other means’, the poem ends up offering a complex enquiry into art’s powers of equivocation. It’s almost impossible to gauge the poem’s tone with any certainty. How ironic is this wistful harking back to the firm Johnsonian ideals of justice which ‘all reasonable beings’ would accept? Are we meant to condemn or to concur ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... series of articles published in the London Journal by the Whig writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and which first appeared as a collection in 1724, took a similar line.By the 1740s, neo-Roman arguments were being used to underpin Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major novelists – Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and ...”

“... made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of Art in Elementary Schools’ (1884), which ‘may afterwards be ...”

“... in relation thereto, and in relation to the exhibiting and showing of his said stomach and the powers and properties thereof and of the appurtenances, and powers, properties, situation and state of the contents thereof. In return for letting Beaumont in and out of his stomach, St Martin was to get board, lodging and ...”

“... Stalin. He is an unswerving member of the British Stalin Society. In Heroes and Hero-Worship, Thomas Carlyle pointed out that modern leader-figures must give voice to emerging currents of social passion and aspiration: they need to feed souls in need of faith and identity. Scargill’s powers of leadership and ...”

“... prime numbers, perfect numbers, squares, cubes. He has understood many of their properties; his powers seem to match those of the young Gauss. He throws off a version of Russell’s paradox in a teasing aside to his father. He gives Roz a drawing to take away, a puzzling pattern of numerals. She works out that it represents factorials and constitutes a ...”

“... was a belief that Henry VII should be better known, and that is also a guiding principle of Thomas Penn’s account of the last decade of his reign. Today’s historians have tried to get away from what Stanley Chrimes called ‘seductive Baconian phrases’; their aim has been to resist Bacon’s ‘imaginative power’ and understand the king and his ...”

“... a woman is going to frame Groucho (both turns in A Day at the Races). But Groucho’s interpretive powers achieve distinct heights of their own. The famous packed cabin sequence from A Night at the Opera is simultaneously an image of the squalor of immigrant crowding and of the immigrant imagination of luxury. Groucho is outside, as befits him, ordering ...”

“... in shifting attention to their own tribulations after total defeat and ruin. The Justice Minister, Thomas Dehler, introducing the Bill, managed not to name the Nazi period, referring instead to ‘the confusion behind us’ and the ‘years of transition and . . . economic convulsion’. A second Amnesty Law in 1954 also bundled together those guilty of crimes ...”

“... Norman’s studiously unattributed materials is a freestanding memorandum written in 1671 by Thomas Hobbes, who in 1623 had been employed as Bacon’s secretary. Addressed as a private note to Hobbes’s patron, the Earl of Devonshire, it exhibits a degree of authenticity that biographers will kill for. Bacon, it says, had beenengaged in the composition ...”