“... are less clear. In his excellent book on the decline of magic in 17th-century England, Keith Thomas stated the problem. Having shown how belief in the supernatural was dethroned on the one hand by the spread of scientific attitudes and on the other by a new Protestant ethic of self-help and stoicism in the face of suffering, he concluded, with admirable ...”

“... four parallel texts on the page (edited from the lucubrations of the great and good Sir Thomas Urquhart, a fellow Scottish patriot and eccentric genius), prints the vowels and consonants of a passage on separate pages, and interrupts the text with blank sections (where the manuscript was supposedly nibbled by mice). Not all of Gray’s literary ...”

“... one of nine children; his father ran a livestock farm. As a young man, he was variously described, Thomas Patterson writes, as ‘disputatious, officious, bossy, ornery, curious, energetic, impudent, eager, smart, a show-off, contemptuous of rules’ and, generally, as a ‘pesterance’. After working as a travelling salesman, Long went to college, obtained a ...”

“... him to establish his Weekly in the dark days of the Republican Fifties. Stone has always revered Thomas Jefferson, and espoused a leftish liberalism intended to recall America to her mission as the best hope of the common man rather than the conservative super-power she has too often become. At the same time, he has preached the need to marry Marx and ...”

“... in libidinous excess. The rhetorical forces of primitive Christianity confronted the demonic powers of Wall Street. In this rhetoric there was ‘a certain gravitas, an undercurrent of apocalyptic finality … foreign to our sense of things today’. Religious language raised the stakes in the struggle against concentrated capital. This was true for ...”

“... against your will or take away your liberty. Whether psychiatrists acknowledge or even want these powers, they come with the territory. It’s ironic, to say the least, that conditions whose biomedical basis is so uncertain should generate diagnoses that are so consequential. These statutory powers aren’t a recent ...”

“... the ‘famous art’ – is magic. The play is part of the Renaissance debate about magic: its powers, its permissibility, its pitfalls. It poses the basic Elizabethan question about magic: liberation or damnation? There has been an upsurge of interest in Renaissance occultism recently, due partly to Jung’s interest in the psychodynamics of magic, and ...”

“... ultimately on grounds that are independent of testimony and accessible to each individual’s powers of reason, memory and observation. For this objection to succeed, reason, memory and observation must themselves be cleansed of testimony. For as Coady points out, much of what passes for observation is already enriched by the testimony of other ...”

“... protégée was ‘so unshaped in some ways’, he wrote urging her to develop her ‘prostitute powers’: ‘This is the way, first to disillusionment, secondly to knowledge, thirdly to freedom from inferiorities and fourthly to anything that may be worthwhile.’ This, from a curly-headed minor who, to compound his cheek, ordered her to read the whole of ...”

“... annexing Canada.Seward also negotiated a treaty with Denmark to acquire the islands of St Thomas and St John, two of its possessions in the Caribbean. A State Department report of 1868, produced for Seward by the former Mississippi senator and ardent expansionist Robert J. Walker, suggested ‘the propriety of obtaining from the same power ...”

“... revolution’ – though in Southern Europe too, to echo the words of the great German historian Thomas Nipperdey, ‘in the beginning was Napoleon.’Isabella shows that the 1820s uprisings originated in two distinct institutional contexts. First, there were the secret societies, which ‘found in the organisation and principles of European freemasonry a ...”

“... careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the Union army’), it gradually turns into a sort of steampunk horror story, featuring the reanimation of corpses and characters with names like The Urfeist and Colonel Blood. Its ...”

“... for much of the Russian population, is described with unsuppressed indignation. (One ‘Comrade Thomas’, a Comintern employee though not even a party member was allowed to disburse 1.22 million gold roubles in Germany in 1921, much of it unaccounted for, before a commission set up by Stalin relieved him of his responsibilities.) The archives yield more ...”

“... In September 1814, the European powers were meeting at Vienna to carve up the continent after the fall of Napoleon. The delegation from the Grand Duchy of Baden was hoping to consolidate the territorial gains it had made under the French empire and to prove itself worthy of a major role in the new Europe. Duchy officials were alarmed, therefore, when they heard that Baron Karl von Drais, a publicity-seeking eccentric who was employed by the Duchy as a forest master, intended to use the Congress as a showcase for his horseless carriage ...”

“... is coaxingly familiar. It didn’t matter to Keats that Chatterton’s spurious versifying priest, Thomas Rowley, was a fiction. What he admired was the result, a revivifying of English style with plum Anglo-Saxonisms. Motion needs us to believe in Dr Tabor’s historicity for the sake of the literary debate that is the novella’s point. But to make the ...”