“... two hundred and forty American Marines in Beirut in 1983; by the kidnappers of Terry Waite and John McCarthy among others; by the hijackers of the Kuwaiti plane in April, and of the TWA plane in 1985, when an American Navy diver was brutally murdered – an act for which Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a young Lebanese Shi’ite, is currently on trial in ...”

“... practitioners, with his own assistants, and not least with his own even more eminent brother, John. Hunter proffered a sinister materialistic explanation for the anatomists’ psychic violence: ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects, may render them less able to bear contradiction.’ No finer case exists of just that psychological ...”

“... both a continuity with the past and the country’s essential doubleness: they are a pre-Christian survival in a nation of official and aggressive Greek Orthodoxy, where people say things like ‘Orthodoxy is not a religion but a way of life,’ or believe that the relationship of Jesus to God and the Virgin Mary is a new version of the triangle ...”

“... for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports a novel spin on this: he was shown round the house by a guide who maintained adamantly that it had once been the home of Rembrandt.) On the day of the inauguration Harar was abuzz with dignitaries and a concomitantly heavy presence of police and ...”

“... people, principally on religious grounds. The Royalist petitioners pleaded in 1659 that they were Christian rather than white, and the same belief in the incompatibility of slavery and Christianity recurs throughout the fascinating account of the colonisation of Barbados published in 1657 by the English agent Richard Ligon. Many planters remained nervous ...”

“... Left to know itself, they have edited the eloquent works of a pre-socialist exponent of liberty, John Warr, who in the months around the execution of Charles I in January 1649 urged sweeping legal and political reforms. In Warr’s eyes, ‘liberty was the antithesis of power,’ not of property as Winstanley the Digger might have maintained: ‘it ...”

“... in England. It was marvellous what bogeys she discovered lurking in apparently blameless texts: ‘John Gilpin’, for instance, ‘because it places an honest, industrious tradesman, worthy to be held out as an example of prudence and economy to men of his rank, in a ridiculous situation, and provokes a laugh at the expense of conjugal affection’. Robinson ...”

“... of their duties as wives and mothers. An almost comically ambitious example is the Venetian monk John the Carthusian’s Decor puellarum (‘Ornament of Girls’). Writing in the late 15th century, John belonged to the most austere of religious orders, which nevertheless specialised in spiritual direction of the laity. The ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if ...”

“... the Arabic love songs of Spain, echoes of classical and medieval Latin poetry and, not least, the Christian concept of love as sacrifice, service and boundless longing. But the troubadours did not merely theorise love: they and their jongleurs performed their exquisitely crafted lyrics in the courts and towns of France, Italy, Spain and eventually all ...”

“... was a Bible-banging fundamentalist. When officials in Dayton, Tennessee decided to roast John Scopes for teaching evolution in 1925, they called in the ageing Bryan to prosecute. The week-long trial became a national sensation and reached its climax when the defence attorney, Clarence Darrow, called Bryan to the stand and eviscerated his Biblical ...”

“... her mind Bishop knew things weren’t that rosy. She was also a novelist – the second cousin of John Irving, she often boasted – and in her three novels (so far unpublished) she was less confident of her prospects. The heroine of the most recent, Amazon Fever, is a female scientist at an Alabama university who is burdened by guilt over the death of her ...”

“... Hondros tell their stories in Reporting Iraq, a gripping little book, put together by Mike Hoyt, John Palattella and their colleagues at the Columbia Journalism Review from hours of interviews with reporters and editors (Melville House, $21.95). Hoyt and Palattella have shaped their material to produce a roughly chronological account of the war in the words ...”

“... of fortune flourished,’ says the cover flap of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by ...”

“... true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and cultural histories of the 1980s. What emerged ...”