“... By comparing the prosecution rates to food prices, by showing how rates correlated with periods of war and peace, by noting the similarities between Surrey and Sussex, he proves that prosecuting levels did not merely reflect anxiety and prosecuting zeal. His account of the role of the magistrates, the nature of the juries and trials, the changing nature of ...”

“... deep spiritual need. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage war against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such. Our ministry is not reformation but transformation. By 1980 Falwell had repudiated this sermon as false ...”

“... to reclaim this comfortless man, who had learnt in his old age to travel the Western world, first-class and rather gloriously, as a late-maturing literary lion. He chose to stay on in a hotel in Geneva and to die there. The interviewers – did anyone ever give more interviews than Borges, or should it be the same interview more times? – were always asking ...”

“... the gutless Lord Mark Rand, gnashes his titled English gums helplessly. Given his class and country, the chances of Lord Mark not being scheming, weak, pale and under-equipped are nil. Lucky, Married Men, Sinners, Chances, The Bitch: Jackie Collins’s oeuvre, which now extends to a dozen titles and over ten million copies in print (Hollywood ...”

“... It did little to change the state apparatus or the economy, but kept itself busy by waging war on the media and debating whether to recognise the ‘knightly orders’ created during the authoritarian interwar regime of Miklós Horthy. It even made timid moves towards rehabilitating Horthy himself. But people weren’t interested in symbolic ...”

“... that is recycling water from the morgue where the corpses of victims of Mexico’s drug war are washed (Air, 2003, by Teresa Margolles) gives a very different feeling from the white cube called The Air-Conditioning Show (1966-67) by Art & Language, an angry manifesto about the way ambience creates value. It sounds insane to fill the Hayward with ...”

“... history of art that often lapses into mechanical studies of ‘context’ with little concern for class and even less for art. As Nagel and Wood polemically put it: ‘“Art” is the name of the possibility of a conversation across time, a conversation more meaningful than the present’s merely forensic reconstruction of the past. A materialist approach to ...”

“... of its potential for enabling renewal. The drawn-out disaster gradually exposed and exacerbated class and regional disparities. The tsunami also brought to the surface deep structural problems: the depopulation of rural areas and the advanced age of their inhabitants (the median age of tsunami victims was reportedly around 70); the economic fragility of ...”

“... 17th century it was estimated that the commons could have bought the lords twice over: the Civil War and Britain’s experiment with republicanism were on their way. One of the principal contributors to this long and uneven process was, of all people, Henry VIII, who repeatedly resorted to Parliament for legislative authority for his divorces and his break ...”

“... da Pisa – a composer of Arthurian romances – while the two were languishing as prisoners of war in Genoa. Polo had travelled as a youth, with his merchant father and uncle, to the realm of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (reg. 1260-94). While his elders transacted their business, the young Marco ingratiated himself with the Great Khan thanks to his ...”

“... book, Diana, Her True Story, came out the following year and marked the beginning of the public War of the Waleses. Junor has known her present subject since 1987, when her first biography of Charles resulted in a writ from Andrew Parker Bowles. She assures us that they laugh about it now. It would be easier to feel sorry for Charles if he didn’t feel so ...”

“... and highly educated, unmoored by economic upheaval, by their reading of Freud and, soon, by the war. They burned with contempt for their parents’ hidebound, stuffy generation, and were determined to live differently; they drank hard and lived chaotically. One university friend, Lucy McKee, shot and killed herself while Stafford was phoning for help. In ...”

“... still steadily digging the soil with his stick. Together they sat down and worked out a new war strategy and in January 1976 resumed military operations as a united force. Machel was very unhappy with this outcome: he had always supported Zanu, and now he had no one to sponsor. He demanded that Mhanda and his friends find new Zanu leaders, so they came ...”

“... market literature’, which flourished from the late 1940s until the outbreak of the civil war in 1967. These were chapbooks inspired by the Indian pamphlets brought back by Nigerian soldiers who had fought in Burma and the Far East. They had titles like Beware of women, My seven daughters are after young boys, and Money hard to get but easy to ...”

“... the lawn with portents of disaster at Gatsby’s parties; no collective urge to write the great war novel; no second sex. To judge by the best of the new writing, the most urgent of the new films, the most-watched television, American lives are now devoted to a wholesale inhabitating of the dead afternoon. It is not the world of beginnings nor the world of ...”