“... of 18th-century Masonry, but their tentative conclusions are at odds with Piatigorsky’s thesis. Paul Monod thinks that the message of restoration underpinning Masonic ritual – the rebirth in every Master Mason of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and ...”

“... that academics started taking an interest in the history of blacks in Britain. In the Sixties, Paul Edwards, originally a specialist in Old Icelandic, produced editions of the two most important African-British writers of the 18th century, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano. In the Seventies, the Black Power movement’s insistence on the need for black ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... march – swastikas flying – through a Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois (a village just north of Chicago), where many Holocaust survivors lived. Faced with the prospect of a Nazi march, the Skokie village board had passed ordinances banning parades with military-style uniforms, banning the distribution of pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group ...”

“... a seemingly impossible 60-day voyage, sailing a six-log raft fifteen hundred miles from their north-eastern village to Rio to dramatise their demand for social reform. Thus, Welles managed to lose the sympathy of the Brazilian regime as well as the support of his studio, RKO, which underwent its own palace coup and, in the summer of 1943, pulled the plug ...”

“... involves placing Asia and the rising sun at the top and disregarding the compass point of the North. Once in India, Roe had to quickly reconsider the likelihood of England’s being feared as ‘a terror to all nations’. The Mughal emperor ruled around a hundred million people. A few years earlier, an EIC merchant called William Hawkins had fairly ...”

“... text has been held genuine by a Semitic philologist (Cyrus Gordon). Superior literacy has rendered North America more prolific in pre-Columbian testimonies. About ninety years ago, a runic inscription was dislodged from the roots of a tree in rural Minnesota: a party of Norsemen (both male and female) had got that far in the year 1362. Until recently the stone ...”

“... off to Germany, though the trains were intercepted and unloaded by partisans on their journey north. Ferrari, ever the pragmatist, turned a blind eye when the partisans among his workforce used his warehouses at night to repair their weapons and craft sabotage devices. He also gave sanctuary to an injured partisan fighter and (separately) a Jewish ...”

“... literary style, with its brusque movements and quick reversals, resisted stagnancy. For Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘a Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket’. Césaire coined the term peléean, from the volcanic Mount Pelée, which overlooked his home town of Basse-Pointe, to capture the way his poetry emerged ‘from a long accumulation ...”

“... 11 per cent.For half a century we have been hearing that 1929 can never return, most recently from Paul Krugman of Princeton, who proposes the old Keynesian strategy for averting a world depression: cut interest rates, flood the markets with money, and if that fails, ensure that governments create demand. But Japan’s ‘lost decade’ has just seen the ...”

“... economy. The legitimacy of the Energy Profits Levy, as with the levy on ‘excess profits’ from North Sea oil in the 1980s, seems partly dependent on the sheer size of the ‘windfall’ and partly on the direct link to consumers’ bills. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may indirectly have boosted the profits of firms in various sectors of the economy, but ...”

“... As dozens​ of lagoons of pig waste overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country ...”

“... to economic stagnation. Either way America had nothing to fear.In his cool-headed history, Schism, Paul Blustein takes issue with both these interpretations. So too do Bob Davis and Lingling Wei in their more journalistic account, Superpower Showdown. With hindsight it is clear that the policymakers of the 1990s and early 2000s did get some things wrong. They ...”

“... a finer nuance of meaning. In their excellent compilation, The Jew in the Modern World (1980), Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz point out that the term’s origin is theological. More specifically, it ‘derives from the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scripture into Greek from the third century BC, in which holokaustos (“totally ...”

“... over much of Syria and Iraq and is spreading its tentacles south to the Gulf states and west to North Africa. How is this dreadful turn of events to be understood? Jean-Pierre Filiu, who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris after a career in France’s diplomatic corps which included tours of duty in Jordan, Syria and Tunisia, argues in his new book, From Deep ...”