“... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...”

“... with a premium on stealth as well as wealth. When Nigel, nephew of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, took on the job in 1126 (or thereabouts) he was simply called ‘the treasurer’. He resigned when made bishop of Ely in 1133 – not the sort of career progression to be expected these days. But the bishop of Salisbury, versatile in his nepotism, happily had ...”

“... the street: ‘There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anyone else understands.’ John Locke, then a political refugee in the Netherlands, simply couldn’t master the mathematics, though this didn’t stop him reviewing the book in the Dutch press. He was glad to be reassured by a local expert that he could take the sums and proofs on ...”

“... instruction book, known as the ‘Bible’, 750 pages long, weighing four pounds. In 1999, John Reckert, a senior executive of Burger King, explained at a conference the relationship between technology and employees. ‘We can develop equipment that only works one way,’ he said. ‘There are many different ways today that employees can abuse our ...”

“... then registers his many failures to honour those vows. He notes benefits given and received (‘I took Mr Townsend and Isackson to the next door, a tavern, and did spend 5s on them’), and is sensitive to imbalances between the two. Affairs of the heart are not isolated from the reciprocal rhythms of receipt and payment: the day after Diana Crisp ‘denied ...”

“... proved attractive to the Latin American countries in its sphere of influence. Britain and France took a different path. They repudiated Montesquieu and concentrated power in a single elected assembly, rejecting constitutional review by a supreme court and subordinating presidents and second chambers to cabinet rule, with the support of the House of Commons ...”

“... best and wittiest voice. There was puzzlement about the problematic outliers: Ruth, which took the side of a seduced girl and her illegitimate child, and Sylvia’s Lovers, a historical novel dealing with the press gangs of the Napoleonic Wars. No one paid much attention to Gaskell’s steady production of sketches, tales and novellas for such ...”

“... the Rivonia trial began in November 1963 was so poisonous that Joel Joffe, then a young lawyer, took the case on only because he had already decided to emigrate. Two years later, he wrote up his lively insider’s view of the trial and allowed Lionel Bernstein, the only defendant to get off, to rewrite it to the point of virtual co-authorship. It was ...”

“... husband, Asif Zardari, would act as regent. The general election, postponed following her death, took place in February. The immediate impact of the stunning electoral defeat suffered by General Musharraf’s political party and his factotums was to dispel the disillusionment of the citizenry. Not for long. Musharraf is still clinging on to the ...”

“... 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That same year, 1861, Rossetti and Swinburne took it up with enthusiasm. Across the Atlantic, the American artist Elihu Vedder, a specialist in antiquarian Eastern fantasies, whose writhing snakes of healing wisdom and forbidding, yet full-breasted, goddesses of scholarship, history and memory still greet ...”

“... John Sayles’s film Lianna broke new ground in 1982 with its portrait of a young wife and mother who comes out as a lesbian. Equally ground-breaking was a scene early in the film in which Lianna’s husband, a philandering, self-obsessed academic, suggests that she have sex with him. Lianna looks at him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation and says: ‘I’ll go put the thing in ...”

“... more concerned about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was ...”

“... un-regally, being a ‘mother’s boy’. In the popular estimation he probably outranks Bad King John and Wicked King Richard III as the worst ever English king. He has this terrible reputation largely because of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This composite work is thought to have been first compiled in the 890s under the auspices of King Alfred, then copied ...”

“... Wedding. It is summer, and 12-year-old Frankie Addams sits at the kitchen table with her cousin John Henry and her black cook Berenice and digs a splinter out of her foot with a knife. The three play bridge with an incomplete deck and they talk until their words almost seem to rhyme. They are a group, but a group Frankie wishes desperately not to belong ...”

“... communicable diseases and to read the warning signs of impending distress. In a paper from 1976, John Rivers of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine described the shift from severe poverty to famine as like freezing water turning to ice: it’s not just a lower temperature, but a change in state. During the early stages of a food crisis, the ...”