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“... survived in the British Empire into the 1830s and in the United States until the end of the Civil War in 1865. (This perhaps explains why Americans all but ignored the anniversary of their own country’s outlawing of the trade on 1 January 1808.) Also lost, of late, according to Marcus Rediker, has been the human experience of slavery. Historical debate has ...”

“... begins: ‘In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her.’ The young man, Saeed, is a dutiful son who lives with his parents. The young woman, Nadia, is strong and independent, and has cut ties with her family. She is ‘always clad from the ...”

“... portrait,’ James once said. His reaction to Sargent’s portrait was to declare it a ‘first-class, living, resembling, enduring thing’. The Reform portrait is not great, but that’s what makes it a living picture in another way – there’s a polite boredom about James’s expression, his apparent lack of interest perhaps a way to mask himself. The ...”

“... America: the spectre of anti-Communism. In a word, Vietnam. Only three weeks into the bombing war in Afghanistan, the dreaded word ‘quagmire’ headed a New York Times piece by the Vietnam-era commentator R.W. Apple Jr, pointing out the ‘many echoes’ between the new conflict and the war America tries hard to ...”

“... words of regret will strike most readers as welcome and overdue. To unrepentant apologists of the war, by contrast, they have the feel of apostasy and betrayal. The question is: does Fukuyama tell us anything that we don’t already know? Can he explain how ‘the irresponsible exercise of American power’ became ‘one of the chief problems in contemporary ...”

“... Ashurst sisters, perhaps Mazzini’s closest English friends. For labour leaders and for middle-class radicals alike, Mazzini was a hero, and indispensable financial backing for his enterprises came from industrialists and businessmen in Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. Without the help of John Macadam and other Glaswegians, Mazzini might not have been ...”

“... Did he lose his enthusiasm for the French Revolution after the Terror and the outbreak of war with Britain? Or did he merely keep his head down during Dundas’s counter-terror in the 1790s, writing for the drawer and staying secretly in touch with seditious comrades? Most recently, critics have asked where Burns stood on slavery. The poet who raised ...”

“... was held to be more responsible for her husband’s policies than he was, more responsible for the war in Iraq than the rarely mentioned Bush administration, responsible for Obama’s policies as though he had carried out her agenda rather than she his. The narratives cast her as a demoness with unlimited powers, or as a wicked woman, because she had had power ...”

“... keeping the ladder of social promotion open, resisting the encroachments of the English governing class’. Ascherson had just left his job as the Observer’s Eastern Europe correspondent to report on Scottish politics for the Scotsman. ‘Coming back,’ he wrote, ‘is not an action which is familiar in the pattern of Scottish activities, if I except ...”

“... intellectual rather than the universal scholar – had begun to emerge following the Second World War. The new intellectuals were concerned with ‘relevance’ rather than excellence; their preoccupations were grounded in the politics and societies around them and in that sense no longer strictly ‘universal’. During the 1960s, a reform movement gathered ...”

“... to provisional acceptance within the majority culture – a means of transcending racial and class barriers. His male characters enter ritzy Knightsbridge clubs on the arm of well-to-do white women. But there are still pitfalls: one of Moses’s Jamaican friends is treated like a possession by a wealthy Chelsea resident whose house has ‘all sorts of ...”

“... century BCe, in which a blameless Helen goes not with Paris to Troy but to Egypt to wait out the war. Part of H.D.’s task in the poem is to integrate seemingly disparate plots and structures of desire, via a kind of psychoanalytic interrogation with Theseus, a Freud-figure.H.D.’s several novels also ring variations on names, as if curled within the name ...”

“... the army, but Dronamraju has little to say about Haldane’s experiences during the First World War, which is surprising given the war’s importance in undermining the red scientists’ confidence in the 19th-century version of progress. Haldane joined the Black Watch, taught officers how to use hand grenades, and was ...”

“... former executive editor of the New York Times, as WikiLeaks’ US partner for the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the outlet for its diplomatic cables. As Chase Madar explains in The Passion of Bradley Manning, none of the material that Manning allegedly leaked is top secret. Out of roughly 250,000 diplomatic cables, for instance, 15,000 to 16,000 are ...”

“... after Senator Joseph Lieberman had cheerfully announced that it was a suitable target for war and occupation. The sad underwear bomber who tried to blow up the Amsterdam flight on Christmas Day had triggered a new interest in the country, and in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), by claiming that while he was converted to hardcore Islamism in ...”