“... who they were and what they were doing is unclear, but they were astute interlocutors and the king, soon to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, considered good relations a means to an end. Charles exhibited the golden treasures the Totonacs brought with them in Brussels town hall, where they were seen by Dürer. ‘In all the days of my life,’ he said, ‘I ...”

“... Breton, Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the rest of us feel bamboozled.The​ essays in Seduction and Betrayal were written when Hardwick and ...”

“... scholarly editions of out-of-print primary texts. ‘The Other Voice’ series, edited by Margaret King and Albert Rabil in 1996 and originally published by Chicago, now runs to more than 150 volumes, primarily of texts by early modern women, several of whom are philosophers. Since 2017, the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy has expanded its focus beyond ...”

“... At Cam Ranh Bay naval base, black servicemen revolted when white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag. The US military leadership fumblingly tried to accommodate the growing number of Black Power activists in Vietnam – military bureaucrats started investigating commanders who ...”

“... smaller matters. Following the Messenger’s lead, Malcolm condemned ‘so-called leaders’ like Martin Luther King, whose 1963 ‘Farce on Washington’, he said, was only another trick to brainwash ‘so-called Negroes’ into believing they would overcome some day. Malcolm was skilled in the rough and tumble of debate ...”

“... on a chair made to look like an inverted, near-naked black woman, an image published on Martin Luther King Day. Abramovich, with his dislike of unnecessary publicity, was not amused. In the Branson household, it’s the man himself who can be relied on to do this sort of thing. The photo on the back of Bower’s ...”

“... good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what ...”

“... to have been generally neutral, and sometimes hostile. Frank Kermode recalled (in an LRB review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread) that he knew several intelligence officers who thought it would be no bad thing if the Russians were defeated while serving to wear down German military capability. Up until the German invasion the SIS had agents in place in Moscow ...”

“... straight in the eye: ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet./Flowed up the hill and down King William Street’. This sampling outlines a familiar story about the modern city: it’s the place where the strength that was meant to come in numbers has been hollowed out or fractured. Carlyle saw London as ‘a huge aggregate of little systems, each of ...”

“... Fermanagh – the Plantation of 1609 was designed to bring civility to these rude parts. The new king, James VI and I, had already attempted to colonise the fringes of Scottish Gaeldom with civilising Lowlanders, as Martin MacGregor’s essay in the collection edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú makes ...”

“... when we were in support. The Hun put over some shrapnel-registering shells, I think. Willie Martin and I were in command of Support trench with 3 platoons (Willie is our second captain – a ripping fellow, a regular officer) we got the men in dugouts and were returning to the telephone dugout. We heard the usual whizz and I dropped down and Willie ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian ...”

“... but it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ideals. Martin Seymour-Smith, Graves’s first biographer and a close friend, traces the demonic bloodlust of the White Goddess all the way back to Graves’s cradle: ‘The infant looked up into its mother’s face, and sensed that – without much ambiguity – she ...”

“... only if long enough to mourn his own life. Of course, he will do more than that, and it is part of Martin Dodsworth’s task in Hamlet Closely Observed to examine the code of conduct, and the place of honour, in the life of the Prince and others, to bring out what might be called the under-examined social history of the play. But Hamlet, one way or ...”

“... Arab state, ‘with full rights for the Jewish citizens’, while the most eirenic Jews, such as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, hoped for a binational state, ‘a common motherland for these two semitic peoples’, as Magnes called it, though he too expected large-scale Jewish immigration. Richard Crossman, who was a member of the commission, concluded that ...”