“... could possibly identify. But apart from being evasive, this is inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents the first of his 11 rules of war: ‘Empathise with the enemy.’ Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It ...”

“... the plague while in Newgate. We don’t know much about what Donne did when he left university. He may have travelled abroad. A ‘Jhon Downes’ is recorded in a list of household servants of the Catholic Earl of Derby from 1587, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or not that was the poet. Donne reappears in the records when in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s ...”

“... journalism – he had been in Nigeria on a business trip at the time of the strike – and this may explain his failure to protect Cudlipp. But it hardly excuses it. Since his return from the war Cudlipp had raised the Pictorial’s circulation to five million (higher than the Mirror’s, another reason for Bartholomew’s hostility), and his dismissal ...”

“... king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return for helping to supply the imperial headquarters at Bari in Puglia and policing the Adriatic ...”

“... was as if the westward movement of settlers were itself a force of nature.’ Chakrabarty may have been right that it’s impossible to write a history of the planet without giving up long-held views about causation, the sequence of events or the specificity of time and place – the bread and butter of most historical research. Then again, those ...”

“... In the chapter in The Prince on the savage Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, he says that cruelty may be well or ill matched to its end, ‘se del male è licito dire bene’ – if it’s OK to talk ‘well’ of evil. Macaulay thought that the Pistola manuscript, a morbid account in Machiavelli’s hand of the Florentine plague of 1523, could not have been ...”

“... on paleographic grounds this is assigned to the seventh or eighth century. The cross itself may be older – not as old as St Thomas, as the relics claim to be, but very beautiful and austere. What this unexpected extension of the Thomas story produced in me was not any access of religious feeling but an intense biographical curiosity. His Indian ...”

“... of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on the ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicoloured, gorgeously plumed sea worms carpeting an underlying shoal, or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the ...”

“... believing her to be Mead’s wife. Pilkington then wrote to Mead asking for assistance, and may well have mentioned her illicit knowledge of his affairs (blackmail was a motif in her life, and people subscribed to the Memoirs in order not to be named in them). Mead sent her one final guinea and refused further contact. Clarke’s comment on the incident ...”

“... masterminded the genocide of 1975-79. Coming 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the trial may seem a bit late. The five Khmer Rouge suspects facing charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes – the former president, Khieu Samphan; the deputy secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, Nuon Chea; the prison camp commander Kaing Guek Eav; and ...”

“... declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”

“... the lethally effective ‘invisible war’ waged against Iraqi civilians between August 1990 and May 2003 with the full authority of the United Nations and the tireless attention of the US and British governments. As an example of carefully crafted callousness this story offers a close parallel to Britain’s German exercise. In both cases, sanctions were ...”

“... writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia ...”

“... made to that end by John Foxe. ‘With these books at your elbow,’ Donne suggests, ‘you may in almost every branch of knowledge suddenly emerge as an authority.’ How do we talk about imaginary books? What kind of existence do they have? In Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998), Anne Lake Prescott calls his fictive titles ...”

“... Sejanus is the ‘evisceration of individuality’. The techniques that van Es evokes so vividly may not have been quite so exclusively Shakespearean as he would like us to believe: plays by later rivals, notably Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, seem to have learned from Shakespeare’s example even if their ...”