“... a historian and lawyer – embeds his well-researched narratives of landmark trials in Europe and North America in a reflective account of the criminal trial process which, if in itself neither especially innovative nor profound, gives purpose and coherence to the story. The outcomes of trials, by contrast, offer little that is coherent. People find ...”

“... Jacobin orator and poet. In the months preceding these arrests most of the action had occurred north of the border. It was crucial to the Government’s case to demonstrate that the British Convention which had been held in Edinburgh in October 1793 as part of a campaign to obtain universal manhood suffrage constituted an overt act of treason: that ...”

“... correlations (and, a fortiori, psychophysical identifications) appear to be mere surds. As Joseph Levine has rightly emphasised, there seems to be a sort of ‘explanatory gap’ between mind states and brain states; one without precedent in the rest of our science. Papineau admits to the gap, but he thinks it’s no problem for his sort of ...”

“... H.D. found it disconcerting after a bucolic childhood in the Moravian town of Bethlehem, further north (her family moved when her father, an astronomer, became the head of the University of Pennsylvania’s Flower Observatory). Pound was a pariah from early on – extroverted and flamboyant and intellectually arrogant. He was related on his mother’s side ...”

“... are the latest, and the most thoroughgoing, in a long line of reforms that go back to Keith Joseph. What has typified all these reforms is that the universities have been treated as the only variable. ‘Business’ and its needs are simply a given. It is the universities that have let the side down; they, not business, must change. The document ...”

“... properties in the nearby village of Charing, two more in South-East London and a holiday home in North Wales, where Nowell and their two daughters had taken refuge during the war. He also possessed a nicely spread portfolio, which included holdings not only in Johnson’s Wire Works but in Lonrho, not yet unmasked as the unacceptable face of capitalism. The ...”

“... history encompassed the interactions of the various political communities to be found in our North Atlantic ‘archipelago’. Long before revisionist historians of the English Civil War decided that their subject should really be known as the British Wars of Religion or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Pocock had begun to explore the archipelagic ...”

“... as in the case of George IV and his giraffe, which was captured as a calf in Sudan and sent north to Khartoum trussed up on the back of a camel. From there she was sent by boat to Cairo, on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm ...”

“... there, it won’t be the first planet to have been discovered in this way. In 1846, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier predicted the existence of another planet in the solar system based on perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. He said how big it would appear to be, and which part of the sky it was likely to be found in. But his colleagues at the Paris ...”

“... of the Holy Grail. This was the ultimate relic: the chalice of the Last Supper, later used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood flowing from Christ’s wounds. It features in a long series of romances. In the French Quest of the Holy Grail, written in the early 13th century, Perceval’s sister sheds her virginal blood to heal a leprous lady, thus ...”

“... be traced back to Hindi and Urdu discredited speculation about the Gypsies’ mythical origins in North Africa. In 1782, the philologist Johann Rüdiger published ‘On the Language and Origin of the Gypsies from India’, which argued that Roma should be given the same rights as other European peoples. Rüdiger and other philologists also contrasted the ...”

“... of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it one of the world’s largest 50 private corporations). The young Moon seems to have been an ordinary enough peasant child until, at ...”

“... in the case of spirits), had such a profoundly destructive effect upon the indigenous cultures of North America in the span of a few decades? This is a well-known example. I mention it here because it allows me to introduce an extraordinary page taken from the report that the French Jesuit Paul de Brebeuf sent in 1636 to the provincial priest of the Company ...”

“... expansion into the Crimea and most of present-day Ukraine had been paralleled, further north, by the partition of Poland after a series of agreements between Russia, Austria and Prussia. These agreements were possible, in large part, because of the disruption of European diplomacy caused by bitter Anglo-French discord. During the Crimean War, there ...”

“... in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in Hartford, Connecticut; never travelled outside North America; the usual run of prizes towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and ...”