“... Half a Millennium Later. Was this any kind of site for Utopia, for Acadia, for the founding of New France? Quoyle, protagonist of The Shipping News and newspaper hack in an outport town – a town, that is, which can’t be reached by road – would have sympathised with Cartier. Quoyle is given to thinking about himself in tabloid headlines. He has lived ...”

“... in Suffolk on Day 167 of the Sizewell Inquiry. In the huge auditorium, indelibly associated with Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, Mr Justice Layfield presided over an inquiry the minutes of which were a lawyer’s dream. How they wallowed in it! Every detail of every pipe of every set of tubes seemed to be dissected. I came away doubting whether this form ...”

“... enough, from the Black Death onwards, Europe had been pestilence-ridden; and war had been rife. France, a relatively advanced country, had undergone decimating famines well into the 18th century. Yet this Malthusian trap had finally been sprung: from the beginning of the 19th century the major Western societies had sustained the rising populations without ...”

“... bliss than Thomas Aquinas, in Augustine’s wake, could ever be. Bynum writes in the sphere of Peter Brown’s influence, and is one of the historians who is revising attitudes to Christianity, not from an avowed parti pris (she wasn’t a cradle Catholic and has not converted), but from a desire for intellectual provocation and a brisk contempt for idées ...”

“... At Albury, the workings of Evelyn’s mind take shape – classical references shading into 1640s France and Italy, reworked in the (momentarily) clear light of Restoration England. Evelyn’s passion for evergreens was one of his major contributions to gardening in general. The North Downs near Wotton, at Leith and Box Hill, were (and are) covered by a pelt ...”

“... story was strangely precarious. Although his Two Treatises were published in 1689, they were, as Peter Laslett showed in the 1950s, largely written before it, in the context of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681. In the wake of the largely imaginary fears aroused by the Popish Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully ...”

“... and seventh centuries, the number of occupied Roman settlements in lowland Britain and northern France dropped by half; in central Italy, by as much as four-fifths.Bobrycki has worked through the records of this diminishment to find evidence of any kind of agglomeration. At times he takes this too far: it’s hard to agree that the ‘multitudes of ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... have arrived in a steady stream. The prime minister of Thailand, the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Indonesia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as a throng of aid ministers, senators, congressmen, MPs and diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week ...”

“... He had, though, spent some years in Paris as a young man, and the detective novels he set in France can be much less stereotypical in their treatment of sex. The Waxworks Murder (1932) takes on real ambiguity when it is revealed that the small family-run waxworks where a body has been discovered keeps itself afloat financially by offering certain ...”

“... 1980s. Most striking is the ‘modernity of witchcraft’, a phrase coined by the anthropologist Peter Geschiere. Technology, science, prosperity and education do not necessarily inhibit the belief in witchcraft; they may actually propagate it, especially if accusing witches breaks with a colonial past and helps to realise national identity. South Africa’s ...”

“... Negotiating the commercial treaty of 1860 with France, Richard Cobden, he later revealed, felt ‘humiliated’ by the contrast between the rational system of measurement in force across the Channel and the weird complication of its British counterpart. Metrication and decimalisation would not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations ...”

“... Keith Thomas puts it, ‘changing gestural codes offer a key to changing social relationships.’ Peter Burke points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a ...”

“... Charter 88 and the Institute for Public Policy Research are promoting the two in harness, as Peter Pulzer explained in the last number of the London Review. Liberty (the NCCL) and polemicists such as Keith Ewing and Ronald Dworkin have confined their attention to a Bill of Rights alone. But the yoking of the two is not accidental. It reflects the cast of ...”

“... certainly fed into Schoenberg’s next major work, the oratorio Gurrelieder, a setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s tale of the Danish king Waldemar’s love for his mistress Tove. In November 1901, Schoenberg moved to Berlin to take up the post of musical director at the Buntes Theatre, one of the city’s most fashionable cabaret venues. It was a ...”