“... brought trouble for humans as well – or for us ‘muggles’, as J.K. Rowling has it. In 1610 Simon Forman, watching Macbeth, was quite sure that the ‘witches’ (as we would label them) were ‘feiries or Nimphes’ and perhaps others thought so too. In Henry V Mistress Quickly of the Boar’s Head Tavern, lamenting the death of Falstaff, cries that ...”

“... plot. A writer telling it according to the calendar, in Hynes’s manner, must desperately envy Simon Schama, in his Citizens, where irreversible changes in the national consciousness seem to be happening almost every other week. There are of course other plot-elements in Hynes’s narrative, less directly measured by the calendar: for instance, a story ...”

“... with meagre resources, he adds (so is Japan, but today technology is vastly more potent). Its strong points did not lie in magnitude of output, but in specialised crafts: high-grade cloth, paper-making, tobacco-processing, diamond-polishing. Technical improvements came thick and fast, ‘contraptions and contrivances of every sort’. Why did all this ...”

“... backing into Australian limelight and the eventual glory of an ARA. He was a man ‘able to show strong feeling only when he was removed from the circumstances which had prompted it’; rarely at all, it might be added, in his painting. He was selfish and pompous and vain (an Australian journalist wrote of ‘the squid-like clouding of a modest soul in the ...”

“... of keeping women in captivity is to make out that they are stronger than you are. Certainly the strong Russian woman is a male literary invention, and by the time there are women writers, like Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, the myth becomes irrelevant, though it is true to say that both poets were very dependent on men, and on being the centre of authority in ...”

“... Invention of Ethnicity in Zimbabwe’, arguing that while the Ndebele sense of nationhood, already strong in Lobengula’s time, as Rhodes acknowledged, grew sharper during the first thirty years of this century, the Shona speakers remained unaware of any shared identity. Yet even before the arrival of the Pioneer Column in 1890, the peoples of western ...”

“... of friendship with Michael’s widow, Rachel, with whom he would have ‘late afternoon cups of strong tea at her flat in Flood Street, Chelsea’, incline him to say such things as ‘it is no exaggeration to assert that the Redgraves defined and extended the possibilities for actors in every medium for over a century’ or that ‘the most commonly used ...”

“... is nothing in that episode which would have surprised the Earl of Clarendon or the Duc de Saint-Simon. They would, unlike Mr Hersh, have seen that NSC staffers were right to compete for what they called ‘rug time’ (i.e. time on Kissinger’s private office rug), for an office on the right corridor, for a car of the right size and importance. These ...”

“... to avoid moral judgment even on the purely personal aspect of the matter. The Daily Mail, that strong supporter of the idealisation of family life propounded by Mrs Thatcher’s court thinkers, talked of Mr Parkinson’s ‘private folly’: but it is ‘all too easy to be censorious and to apportion blame’, it sympathised, and blamed ‘bizarre working ...”

“... suggests that Stead’s expressed dislike of lesbians, and a preference for men’s company so strong it could sometimes seem a dislike of women, must really have been the repression of a lesbian side in herself; and she cites two instances where Stead’s intensity made women feel that this was so. Apart from my sense that there is a logical flaw here ...”

“... as a sort of minor Wells, or perhaps a minor Kipling. But whatever else he believed – and he had strong, sad views on the world – Golding believed that he knew as well as anybody how the world worked, and also how its workings could best be represented in fiction. When The Spire came out one’s first reaction was to be astonished that he seemed to have ...”

“... reading the wonderful fat new edition of Pevsner’s City of London, revised and expanded by Simon Bradley.* I found myself repeatedly escaping from the shallow architectural culture of Houston (founded 1836, the year of Texan independence) into imaginary rambles through my own city (founded 50 BC); and indulging a slightly self-conscious relish for the ...”

“... way of talking about aliveness has changed. In the late 1970s, with the electronic toys Merlin, Simon and Speak and Spell, children began to classify computational objects as alive if they could think on their own. Faced with a computer toy that could play noughts and crosses, what counted to a child was not the object’s physical but its psychological ...”

“... and led to the arrest of Mark Thatcher in South Africa and the jailing of the British mercenary Simon Mann in Zimbabwe. Shaxson toys with the idea that the US (and possibly Spain and Britain) encouraged the attempted coup. The US would have had good reason to welcome a change of regime. Obiang’s son, Teodoro Nguema, owns an airline, a large timber ...”

“... Iraq. A third British firm, ArmorGroup, was reported by the Washington Post in June to have a 1200-strong force in Iraq, with 240 armoured trucks. ArmorGroup is engaged in constant warfare as it goes about its main business of escorting supply convoys; it was attacked 293 times in the first four months of 2007, the Post reports. The narrow focus on a single US ...”