“... the prophet is a familiar one, first advanced by the great liberal Protestant Franciscan scholar, Paul Sabatier, more than a century ago. It contains elements of truth, but overall it is grossly misleading. The myth of the deliberate smothering of the radical Francis can be sustained only if one views it in isolation from what was happening in all the other ...”

“... She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan,’ wrote Paul Colin, who sketched her for La Revue nègre. Baker’s notorious horizontal movements were propelling her to the top of the world. Hers was the American dream, the assimilationist success story that (as Tylor Stovall argues in Paris Noir: African Americans ...”

“... to which he had been transferred after his health declined in the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Concealed in the watch was a coded message detailing his role in an elaborate escape plan involving some two dozen comrades, many operating in disguise. The plan went off without a hitch; minutes after climbing into the waiting carriage, Kropotkin ...”

“... an inconvenience! If a purported science, or indeed any secular discipline, can’t satisfactorily lay out the grounds on which outsiders should accept its propositions, that should prove by itself to be an eventually terminal defect. Its most serious consequences will be felt within the discipline, for theorists will not be able to settle their differences on ...”

“... incomes policy and labour legislation, precedes the authors’ general conclusions. The lay reader will need to labour hard to derive meaning from this massive study. Its statistical detail is overwhelming. The preoccupation with a historical record concluding a decade ago is perplexingly antiquarian, given the radical changes which have occurred ...”

“... by Indian soldiers in a small, suffocating cell in the city. It refers to the unsayable that lay, and still often lies, at the heart of the colonial encounter, the breakdown in the Western observer’s language when he or she attempts to describe a different culture, the mouth open but the words unable to take form. In Western literature, the unsayable ...”

“... over a presidential campaign decades after the FLN took to the gun.New and shiny, Macron hopes to lay this difficulty to rest. It is more than sixty years since the Algerian war began and the time is right, even if no one is willing to take the step: shame is a major obstacle, and perhaps also the worry that an apology would lead to calls for proof of ...”

“... certainly thought so. Nkrumah was in no doubt. He invited Padmore to Ghana. Together they would lay the groundwork for a Pan-Africanist International and turn Accra into its continental HQ.Padmore’s experience of Nkrumah’s Ghana was mixed. Two shifts in Pan-Africanist ideology took place during his lifetime (he died in 1959). Like Du Bois, the movement ...”

“... Ortona,​ Christmas Eve, 1943. A thriving Adriatic port only days previously, it now lay in ruins. The population of ten thousand was gone. In their place were two battalions of elite Fallschirmjäger – German paratroopers – defending what was left of the town, and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, who were under orders to take it ...”

“... tells us that early in the war editors and publishers ‘began to receive a flow of new work which lay outside any of the literary beginnings with which they were familiar. It was sharp, colourful and often political.’ Well, very likely a tiny percentage of it actually was ‘sharp’ and ‘colourful’, whilst in the nature of things most of it must have ...”

“... changed his positive allegiances a good deal; Michael Sandel, like Charles Taylor and Pope John Paul II, makes a great thing of ‘identity’. They stress the difference between the way we are ‘constituted’ by our membership in a variety of communities and the ‘abstract’ individuals that thinkers obsessed with rights write about. Seen from this ...”

“... detail to convince us that this was no trivial threat. Drawing on the work of Don Fehrenbacher and Paul Finkelman, McPherson also presents a very clear explanation of the significance of the Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, and added for good measure that when the ...”

“... pathologist are called at random, and the testimony of each is given equal weight by the lay judge and jury, or is estimated by law standards. I would urge upon you, as a jurist, that of all branches of medicine experimental pathology is the most highly technical, expert and difficult, requiring rare natural gifts and long and critical ...”

“... pages, showing Shell posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and ...”

“... owes nothing to Classical models, is very far from being ‘primitive’ either. Like the work of Paul Zumthor in the field of medieval literature, Schapiro’s essays help us to see the inadequacy of notions of artistic norms derived from the Renaissance. ‘The standard of nature is an obstacle to critical insight,’ he remarks at one point in his ...”