“... to verbal and physical abuse by police officers who had arrested her in flagrant abuse of their powers and given perjured evidence at her trial. Then the Home Secretary announced the abolition of the right to silence for detained persons held in police stations. Then a man who had been ‘verballed’ by West Midlands Police was awarded £70,000 in ...”

“... their rivals. The result is extraordinary and often depressing. ‘Unexpected disasters,’ Keith Thomas wrote in Religion and the Decline of Magic, ‘the sudden death of a child, the loss of a cow, the failure of some routine household task – all could, in default of any more obvious explanation, be attributed to the influence of some malevolent ...”

“... für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV) owes its existence to the Allies. When the Western powers gave the green light for the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in their zones of occupation in 1949, they also gave the constituent assembly permission to set up ‘an office to collect and disseminate information on subversive activities against ...”

“... at the block, and the headsman had to pin her down. Even the more sedate accounts agree that, like Thomas Cromwell, she was hacked about by a second-string executioner. Higginbotham’s narrative begins with this bungled beheading – so either the jacket designer was in the dark about the contents, or someone at her publisher has a mordant sense of ...”

“... struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why ...”

“... was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that Richard was immature was made explicitly by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in the sermon he preached on Richard’s deposition in 1399. There he contrasted the ‘boy’, Richard, with his supplanter, the ‘man’, Henry IV. He also elaborated on the childlike characteristics that rendered ...”

“... Lewes wrote, ‘one of that class whose unwritten poems, undemonstrated discoveries, or untested powers, are confidently announced as certain to carry everything before them, when they appear. Only they never do appear.’ Clough’s premature demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether ...”

“... how much knowledge is limited by national boundaries. The Macmillan has a nice photograph of Dylan Thomas but does not say why anybody should bother to read him, only that he died of drink. Longman by contrast gives a carefully-worded appreciation, taken from Columbia. Macmillan says that St Thomas Aquinas is one of the most ...”

“... Bacon’s the tobacconist, and on Bacon’s wall, if it stands yet, there’s an engraved poem by Thomas Calverley of which I can still quote a stave or two when maundering over the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in ...”

“... wife, Philippa, was Katherine’s sister, and so their children became part of this ménage. Thomas, his eldest son, was born around the same time as Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son by Blanche, who would seize the throne as Henry IV in 1399. It was Gaunt’s lavish patronage that enabled Thomas to make a brilliant ...”

“... Lilla calls the Great Separation: the sharp distinction between politics and God proclaimed by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century but rarely implemented as vigorously and decisively as Lilla would like. Deeply affected by the religious wars of early modern Europe, Hobbes wanted to ratchet down the stakes of political conflict. If adversaries no longer ...”

“... the grounds that she too was plain) and of her incapacity to please despite the efforts she made. Thomas Staley, in his study of Jean Rhys’s fiction, discusses the sad fate of her heroines at the hands of ‘a male-dominated bourgeois society’ and refers to them as victims of ‘negative narcissism’, a condition ‘where the female, treated exclusively ...”

“... had to be thanks to the dizzying succession of treaties of offence and defence between Europe’s powers. Henry’s first effort to flex his muscles in France, in 1513, saw him lead an army of something like 28,000 men joined in France by around seven thousand German and Dutch mercenaries. At the same time a force of more than 26,000 marched north at speed to ...”

“... cared? It was part of their punishment. Denmark sent convicts to its Caribbean colony of St Thomas, where they cleared land, planted crops, fished and built houses. The British employed the inmates of their ‘model’ penal colony at Mazaruni, Guyana, established in 1842, to quarry granite, a commodity that commanded high prices. It was a bonus that ...”

“... medicine: here is a therapeutic technique of proven efficacy which is quite beyond the vaunted powers of Western scientific patho-anatomy to explain. There is much truth in claims of this sort, so often touted by Western alternative medicine fans on behalf of indigenous Chinese medicine. As is quite clearly brought out in The Essential Book of Traditional ...”