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“... for those words at the day of judgment.’ The Reformation itself is tackled by Alistair Fox and John Guy. Alistair Fox, in the opening essays of the book, discusses Humanism, previously the main dues ex machina of the teleological interpretation of the Reformation. In his dissection of the notion that there is ‘one coherent thing called humanism’, Dr ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South ...”

“... dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or otherwise, according to the order of the laws of England’. That raffish, bisexual gallant, Raleigh’s half-brother, was to control the freehold of the Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... victory of the representative institution (and all, incidentally, now much in doubt). The only laws made in Parliament that received attention were those which could be accommodated in this history of constitutionalist politics (the landmarks of freedom), and the only business dealt with at length illustrated the growing independence of elected ...”

“... entirely by whites. These abolished slavery – they had no choice – but enacted a series of laws called the Black Codes to define the freedom African Americans now enjoyed. They had virtually no civil or political rights, and all adult black men were required to sign a labour contract with a white employer at the beginning of each year or be deemed a ...”

“... well of by their peers and to provide the material for favourable obituaries. The making of laws, the laying down of general rules and principles, albeit in the shape of specific decisions, is not the same as seeking justice in individual cases. The judge who follows his own instincts, without thought of the effects in consequential cases, is a ...”

“... Physics, in which he ‘was able to show’ that in a universe whose expansion never ceased ‘the laws of physics and information theory allow life to survive for ever using a finite store of energy.’ How could this be defended? As follows. In an ever-expanding, ever-cooling universe, the energy needed for processing each bit of information grows ...”

“... not a single ‘contingency’; everything in it is there in illustration of those general laws of human demeanour which he has spent his adult life searching out in the society around him. The novel, in fact, is his valediction to that society and to his own unworthy social self and the comments that he allows himself on it in his letters converge ...”

“... some potentially valuable ‘blood’. The Jews were the only group defined legally in Nazi-era laws, an ‘honour’ accorded to no one else, not even to racially insecure Bavarians, who wanted recognition as ‘Germans’. Because they were the only group so precisely defined, Jews were also the only group the Nazis could attempt to eradicate as a ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... the privilege, but from the conviction that no one deserved it. And yet, the drafters of the new laws, and the guardians of the secret interpretation of those laws, do feel that they deserve the privilege; and if you could ask them why, they would answer: because there are elections. We, in America, now support a class of ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... for a period as long as two years, and required to attend overnight at an address elsewhere. These laws are based on anti-terror provisions, whose powers of forced relocation have gone without significant challenge, but their use will not be limited to criminals. They will apply to people who have done little more than attend two protests considered likely to ...”