“... problems surrounding the familiar poll-tax registration setting of the first Christmas. Mark and John tell us nothing about Jesus’s birth; Matthew sets it in the reign of Herod the Great, to which Luke assigns the Annunciation. Luke’s specificity regarding the circumstances of the Nativity inspires confidence (2.1-5): ‘And it came to pass in those ...”

“... with her friend Katherine. They wrote it most evenings in the desolate hours between the end of John Craven’s Newsround and the arrival of the ice-cream van on their housing estate, a period marked by the combustion of chip pans in the kitchens of the negligent, pans then carried hurriedly onto doorsteps and thrown into the air like torches at a Viking ...”

“... If they’ve arrived too late, they should have gone in earlier.The Orton material is drawn from John Lahr’s biography, Prick Up Your Ears, which plays the part in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility that The Trial did in Sterling Karat Gold – a text to be ‘put to work’, in Waidner’s phrase. Orton’s literary executor was his agent, Peggy Ramsay. She ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... gospel’, he means not the real and only one, some sort of competitor for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but our gospel, the one a sceptical but still God-haunted age might want to build for itself. If you wonder, as I did, what a long-time man of the Left like Saramago is doing with this stuff, the answer lies not in the possible truth or moral authority of ...”

“... of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not published until 1802, so Smith may not have seen it (though I bet he did). It contains an account of the meeting between Lochiel and Charles Edward at MacDonald of Boradale’s. Lochiel argued long and hard ...”

“... been known to scholars for some time and which include the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John, they are the first large-scale and direct presentation of Gnostic beliefs: hitherto nearly all our knowledge has come from the descriptions (abusive but on the whole accurate) and excerpts given by their orthodox opponents. The roots of Gnosticism, a widely ...”

“... inspiration at least as much from the ‘positivist’ legacy of Comte (and his mentor Saint-Simon) as from the more obvious influences of either democratic socialism or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the most prominent social planners of those years, such as William Beveridge and Barbara Wootton in Britain, Pierre Laroque and Francis Netter in ...”

“... its revenue, the company was vested in trustees. But the press as a whole had no such luck. As Simon Jenkins has reminded us, the great proprietors bought and sold their newspapers for power, prestige and, they hoped, money. The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer ...”

“... that the tracker had not been issued by the police but was the personal property of a GTTF cop, John Clewell, they contacted the FBI. It turned out that another officer in the unit lived next door to Anderson. What if the police had broken into Anderson’s flat? ‘I wasn’t even believing it as I was saying it,’ one of the drug detectives said. Leads ...”

“... film-maker and accountant were members, along with Rotten – now using his more sober real name, John Lydon – and three other musicians. In October, PiL released their first product, a single called, with corporate thoroughness, ‘Public Image’. It was a streamlined, surging noise that hadn’t been heard before, and reached number nine in the ...”

“... hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap star in her knickers, usually followed by a report, written with barely contained ...”

“... Simon Schama​ is devoting a trilogy to the 3000-year-long ‘Story of the Jews’. His attention, however, is not evenly distributed. The first volume, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, spent 473 pages on the 2500 years between 1000 BC and 1492 AD. The second, enigmatically entitled Belonging, requires 790 pages to cover the 400 years between 1492 and 1900, and two characters who presumably attracted Schama because they both preached a Jewish return to Zion ...”

“... the promised projects had failed to materialise. Insiders leaked emails and financial documents to Simon Clark and Will Louch at the Wall Street Journal, who started to publish evidence of malfeasance. US federal prosecutors brought fraud charges against Naqvi, and in April 2019 he was arrested on disembarking from a plane in London. He paid £15 million in ...”

“... fatal flaws make his or her downfall inevitable. But why? This new edition of the novel, edited by Simon Avery, has appendices that include those early reviews, as well as Hardy’s own prefaces to various editions, maps, extracts from contemporary works of science and philosophy that Hardy read, a small selection of his poetry, pertinent passages from his ...”