“... the merits of membership in order to hold her government together, Thatcher refused to name the day, or even to indicate that a time would come when she could. Doing so, she felt, would be another open invitation for speculators to target the pound. Lawson and Howe were stymied by her intransigence but realised there was little they could do about ...”

“... photographs of her prostrate form surrounded by policemen appeared in the press next day. The Daily Mail even provided a reassuring caption: ‘Police Aid Brittan Demo Girl.’ Her second ‘mistake’ was to appear as witness for Charles Alcock’s defence, on 29 April. (He was acquitted on a charge of threatening behaviour.) During the next few ...”

“... I tell you, you deserve to be indicted more than any man that hath been brought to the bar this day ... Mr Justice May: Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ... The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a mark on you ... The Mayor: I will cut his nose ... This did not sufficiently strengthen the jury, so they were hauled off to prison for the ...”

“... a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re in the middle of a regression which is present in the form of a return to the religious … a rehabilitation of spiritualism.’ Spinozism was part of this: ‘the latest example of ...”

“... to kill anyone. (Nikolas Cruz, who gunned down 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day, vowed in a comment on a YouTube video that ‘Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.’) Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been ...”

“... last week has been a real drama – living, leaping & throbbing, with the acts bounding over from day to day – on a huge national stage.Once​ the throbbing was over, there was a vacuum in Irish public life. In his 1922 essay ‘Ireland after Parnell’, Yeats noted that he had predicted the rise of ‘an intellectual ...”

“... was before the Polizia Postale arrived at the villa. Trying to piece together what happened on the day following the murder, let alone the night of the crime, is tortuous. Sollecito told the postal police that they suspected there’d been a break-in: there was a broken window in the bedroom belonging to Filomena Romanelli, one of Knox and Kercher’s two ...”

“... an inefficient, authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that ...”

“... stature. Far more than any of his contemporaries he cut through the conventional wisdom of his day, and though implacably devoted to the task in hand, he always took the long view. He shocked Dulles, at the height of the Cold War, by informing him that Communism was a passing phenomenon, that the notion of a single ‘Western’ interest was absurd and ...”

“... its readiness to dictate terms to his government. In that event, Cromer replied, before election day there would be no sterling reserves left. In which case, said Wilson, they would let sterling float. In which case, shouted Cromer, there would be an international financial crisis (there wouldn’t, of course: Britain floated the pound without difficulty in ...”

“... themes. ‘An Unearthly Child’ was broadcast on a date to conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic concept had come from Sydney Newman, the recently appointed head of drama at the BBC. He was looking for something that would hold children, teenagers and adults in the then-as-now transitional Saturday teatime slot, between ...”

“... on the window-sill.’ Certainly, as Miller illustrates with copious reference to the historian Douglas Shand-Tucci’s studies of homosexual Boston at the turn of the century, Eliot’s Harvard provided ample opportunities for him to cast off his Midwestern earnestness and metamorphose into ‘a very gay companion’, ‘an aesthete’ and ‘a ...”

“... major and recurrent threat. Faced with a Parliament that was (in the phrase of the legal historian Douglas Hay) stupendously over-representative of the wealthiest, the disenfranchised turned to political reform. It is relevant, therefore, that the period covered by these books opens in the aftermath of Peterloo: political discontent was now being met not with ...”

“... into the Robin Hood films, and Knight helps us to see each in the context of its time. In the Douglas Fairbanks silent Robin Hood (1922), Robin’s decision to return from the Crusades reflected contemporary American isolationism: stay out of wars in Europe. The Errol Flynn film The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) imagined a New Deal camp in Sherwood ...”

“... by media greedy for stories about sex, the leggy Jay twins (daughters of the Labour politician, Douglas Jay) and campus revolutions. Briggs, as dean of social sciences, was boosterish about his learning reforms, although much more radical changes, including the Scottish pattern of a generalist first year, had already been introduced at the pioneering ...”