“... first encounter with Protestantism in mainland Europe, on embassy in Lutheran Nuremberg, Cranmer took a keen interest in the innovative liturgy he saw there, but also in Margarete, niece of the pastor presiding in the church of St Lorenz; he married her just before Henry chose him as archbishop of Canterbury, and she eventually joined him in his ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... All these types dance through the short, catastrophic history of the Company of Scotland, which took a nation’s money to found a colony on the Panama isthmus in 1698 and ended flat bust in 1701. To read about Darien is to feel that, in a deep sense, venture capitalism is incapable of learning from experience. Of course, its technologies in industrial ...”

“... called Don Griffin, who, like my father at the time, worked as a guard for British Rail, took offence. Out the Saxon dog went and off down the high street, with my father in hot pursuit, and me in hot pursuit of my father. At the end of the street there was a cemetery. Don leapt over the wall, my father followed, with me bringing up the rear, all ...”

“... by an arrogant ignorance of the land and people it was taking over. For 24 hours after the US army took control there was relative quiet, since the Baghdadis assumed they were under curfew. When they found they weren’t, wide-scale looting began. The looting of the Iraq Museum was a three-day affair, in which more than 15,000 items were stolen from public ...”

“... enjoyed a surge in business unmatched since the collapse of the Soviet Union; paramilitary forces took control of the oil infrastructure. By 2014 two competing governments had emerged, neither of which was in a position to govern. Algerian and Tunisian jihadists found a haven free from French-trained counter-insurgency units. Islamic State established its ...”

“... in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England Ensured, an anonymous pamphlet which appeared in 1659, shows that the image of the Commonwealth as being created from ...”

“... the FBI does not normally investigate sexual assault cases.) Kavanaugh denies that the incident took place, but – although presumably an advocate of the rule of law – opposes Dr Ford’s request that there should be a further investigation by the FBI as part of its routine background checks for important government nominees. The evangelist Franklin ...”

“... then, or at least surrounded me in my own head. Sometimes it surrounds me still. One day, my mum took me into Irvine town centre in the afternoon, Kilwinning is a satellite of Irvine, the main town, as Pennyburn is a satellite of Kilwinning. We came from the station, and she brought me up to some high flats. My eyes were everywhere; the present wasn’t just ...”

“... only interest was golf. Having created in Kennedy a glamorous genius, innumerable writers then took pleasure in demonstrating that he was both frivolous and false and in destroying his reputation with gossip. But it can be argued that Kennedy was an able leader, with a fresh and alert mind, who was respected by other world leaders. It is but simple truth ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print ...”

“... an exhilarating place to imagine they’d found it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right Opposition to the ...”

“... were often, therefore, scarcely-veiled solidarities between rich and poor in Italian society. They took different forms, certainly, in north and south, town and country, but from the state’s point of view they all represented a challenge to its authority and therefore, by definition, to the rule of law. By the 1880s it was widely believed in Italy that no ...”

“... book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and ...”