“... opposite of the homely expertise in country matters of Hardy, or the more pointed one of Edward Thomas. The disinclination to be specific, in terms of the world of real things, gives its own sort of bleak originality to the world of Davie’s poetry – a world very much more extensive than this aspect of it would seem to indicate. The most striking thing ...”

“... thought, but rarely proven, to have helped to spread this deplorable infection. Meanwhile the powers that be seem unable to contain it, and generally take the money when it comes to hand. The situation in Algeria has a clear parallel in Sudan, where fundamentalist claims to administrative dictatorship over Christians, but also over Africans adhering to ...”

“... as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little pamphlet, ‘speedily botched up and compiled’, as he put it, called The Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions. It is full of digressions: ‘I have rid a false ...”

“... vaguely conceived, free-floating notion of ‘humanity’ itself. The result was invaluable to the powers implementing it. If recruitment to that kind of Englishness became one of the prizes offered by the builders of Empire to those over whom they ruled, there was also a practical side, since the exported teachers on whom it relied were clearly less ...”

“... relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from ...”

“... French philosophy. In the event only one lion bothered to come to the front of the den, where his powers of concentration were spoiled by a playful tiger; the other four lions ignored the proceedings; perhaps, like the Duke of Lauderdale, they preferred the mew of a cat to the best music in the world. Wesley’s test for signs of spirituality in the king of ...”

“... central Italy was split into a handful of duchies whose ruling families were in thrall to foreign powers. Lombardy and the Veneto were incorporated into the Austrian empire. The only large and independent Italian state was Piedmont, a monarchy whose Francophone royal family governed without a constitution. To strengthen Piedmont against France, the victorious ...”

“... the ear of a total vacuum.’ Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and the American plenty. He was the ideal son of a platonic union ...”

“... concept of the ideal society or Utopia. I need not remind you that the discoverer of Utopia in Thomas More’s book was supposed to have been a Portuguese by birth who had sailed with Amerigo Vespucci to New Castile, but stayed behind when Vespucci returned, to explore the New World further. Equally, and perhaps more important, was the novelty of the ...”

“... Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using ...”

“... no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ingenuity’. The late treatise on the Passions rests entirely on the assumption that the body is a ‘machine’. Even the truculent hero of the Meditations will ...”

“... should be developed piecemeal over a period of fifty years. As a result, both the distribution of powers and the language used to describe them is often opaque. Comprising 20 Commissioners and eighteen thousand officials to do their bidding, the Commission represents the so-called ‘supranational’ model. The current President, Romano Prodi, has described ...”

“... daily administration of justice’ caused by Fascism’s ‘failure to respect the separation of powers’. Readers will struggle to find such a careful analysis; besides which, in Italy, a failure to observe Montesquieu’s ideal separation of powers can hardly be considered a prerogative of the Fascist regime. What is ...”

“... a first bibliography, and respectful salutations from across the literary scene: Dylan Thomas emerged best from the exercise, warmly praising ‘a wide and deep poet’ before adding, impishly: ‘Congratulations on Auden’s seventieth birthday.’ He did indeed seem senior beyond his years. The issue had a double-page Faber advert, on one side of ...”

“... however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more important figure, because he is the exemplar for a thesis which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern ...”