“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”

“... Morgan puts it, Foot was not just Bevan’s comrade but (modestly) ‘his Boswell, his Engels, his John the Baptist, and of course his parliamentary heir’. At this distance it is difficult to understand the passions of the decade-long civil war between Bevanites and Gaitskellites which originated with the split of 1951, when Gaitskell imposed prescription ...”

“... nostrils and down into their stomachs. They called this ‘intensified assisted feeding’. Dr John Edmondson, the commander of the US Naval Hospital at Guantánamo at the time, swore an affidavit saying: ‘The actual feeding process, both at the detention hospital and on the cell block, is very voluntary.’ (Edmondson left Guantánamo early in 2006. On ...”

“... rented an adult film on motel pay-per-view. They were the victims of ‘total surveillance’, as John Parker calls it. Yet it mattered little – Atta’s driver’s licence may not have been in order but there were some 200,000 outstanding traffic warrants in Broward County. The attacks of 11 September both reinforced and exploded the fashionable myth that ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool Grosart’, but things took an altogether more serious turn when it was discovered, very late in the day, that Grosart had not only reproduced, without acknowledgment, entries he had already published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but had resorted to inventing some of his sources as ...”

“... who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would ...”

“... town. Most of the changes which gave us the modern criminal trial, and which are the subject of John Langbein’s book, came about in the last part of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th. Their legal and practical effect from 1822 to the present has been tracked in the 54 editions of the Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... second marriage had been annulled, his first had ended in divorce), but married her secretly, then took extraordinary precautions to prevent anyone knowing he was married, living apart and visiting Charlotte only clandestinely. The problem was Germaine de Staël, with whom Constant had been locked in a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair for some 12 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... died hard. Although Price insists on the particular industrial context in which conflict took place, he refuses to accept that this manifested merely a defensive resistance to encroachments. He rejects, in short, the Leninist distinction between a ‘trade-union’ consciousness, limited by its spontaneity to immediate grievances, and a ...”