“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... Dr Abse’s analogy is false. There are clear differences of degree in anti-semitism. Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot (LRB, Vol. 6, No 20), Professor Ricks began: ‘Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I ...”

“... leaver. It may be difficult to decide on any one standard and stick to it. The editors are not keen on the line put forward by Peter Townshend, of 140 per cent of the supplementary benefit level, because it would leave over one and a half million people receiving less than half the average wage. An even stronger ...”

“... you not pack my dress shirt? PS: I have just found it’ that it is hard to see why Jerome was so keen they should ‘do business together’. He was no fool, however, and screwed up the publisher’s terms to his advantage. Most of Jerome’s papers were destroyed after his death, but there is no suggestion that they harboured dark secrets. In 1928, a year ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... the founders’ explicitly Communist original project – the Hungarian émigré concrete sculptor Peter Laszlo Peri, or the artist Felicia Browne, who would be killed fighting the fascists in Spain – but others got involved as a sort of charity work, donors to the cause rather than fighters for it. Friend writes that the AIA has been quite poorly served by ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents). If Netanyahu imagined that by attacking Gaza he could inflict defeat on Hamas, and rescue his own precarious political career, he has ...”

“... relies principally on intuition and imagination has its own drawbacks. Robb himself is sometimes keen on dates and facts, but only, in keeping with the Stukeleyesque tradition, when they suit. At its best, his overlay of the present onto the deep past is illuminating. Following Caesar’s Gallic campaign he finds a point in the streets of Hautmont that gives ...”

“... spectacle’ in Paris and attempted to protect several Huguenot friends at some risk to himself. Keen to emphasise Walsingham’s high ideals, Cooper contrasts his choice of exile with the nicodemite conduct of his future colleague William Cecil, who opted for compromise when Mary came to the throne and even accepted the Mass in his private chapel to secure ...”

“... today might well be surprised by its liveliness. As you’d expect, Theologus and Philagathus are keen on preaching, church attendance and private devotion, and take a hard line on ignorance and sin. Theologus preaches a standard predestinarian Calvinism, which at the turn of the 17th century had not yet taken on the anti-establishment associations it would ...”

“... Thomas’s essential narrative of a culture becoming modern is derived in no small part from a keen appreciation of Hobbes’s scepticism. Even as social and cultural historians were establishing the power dynamics and belief systems of early modern England, another group of historians was turning to Hobbes in order to carve out a different agenda. Rather ...”

“... and is impossible to reconcile with his limited educational attainments – something Hale is very keen to emphasise. ‘No Renaissance artist, with the exception of Andrea Mantegna, was able to read or write Latin.’ This is a bold claim, considering how little we know about most artists of that period, and not hard to challenge (Alberti wrote a treatise in ...”

“... and naturalist Thomas Jefferson, who cherished a vision of prehistoric American greatness and were keen to establish that America had indeed once supported giants. What happened in Madrid had an enduring significance: it was ‘the first reconstruction of an entire extinct animal’, long before reconstructed dinosaurs, mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers ...”

“... likely to cause his downfall. At least this is less bizarre than the bracketing of Gorbachev with Peter the Great and Alexander II as ‘Russian rulers who seized their country by the scruff of the neck and hurled it onto a new level of change and growth’. Quite apart from the highly inappropriate characterisation of Alexander II, the analogy sheds little ...”