“... wielding a shovel in a French concentration camp had been received by Stalin, Roosevelt and the king of England’. After the French collapse these camps became ‘mousetraps’ from which escape was both necessary and difficult: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Weiss and Walter Hasenclever all committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo. Those ...”

“... 1980s, he seems to glance back at bygone cultural positivity in a semi-ironical spirit. Compare Peter Halley and his ‘prison’ paintings of dayglo grids, which revisit Modernist design as a malign scheme of social control, or the affectless mixer-machine colour binges of Damien Hirst’s ‘spin’ and ‘spot’ paintings. Such sardonic palettes ...”

“... portrait (c.1610, provenance largely a matter of late 17th-century rumour) and the statue by Peter Scheemakers, commissioned years later for the monument to Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey (unveiled in 1741). All of these are by now hopelessly burdened with connotations of British prestige, respectability and solid worth – hence the ...”

“... old people whose powers are failing by the criteria of virtuous behaviour appropriate to maturity. King Lear being an obvious case in point, Small gives an elaborate account of it. Is Lear mentally and morally impaired when he divides his kingdom? If he is so, and continues to be so as the action proceeds, we should perhaps take the fact into account when we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or who refused to assemble, undermined the status quo. In the 750s, for instance, the Lombard king Desiderius bestowed the Trita valley – a remote backwater beneath the peaks of the central Apennines – on the monks of his local monastery. The monks thought that the gift included the valley’s peasants, and began demanding rent and labour. The ...”

“... But the notion that a friendly press can deliver votes has never been very convincing. Cecil King wasn’t the first person to see that newspapers could accelerate or slow up a trend, but never reverse or create one. The popular press, as Koss notes, encouraged a volatile public opinion which it could provoke and stimulate but seldom guide once the ...”

“... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of ...”

“... of many colours by the water’s edge, my mother has many garments of gold,’ the Erlking, or King of the Alders, calls out, luring his prey into the depths of the forest. The child riding with his father through the windy night immediately recognises the voice of the Erlking, and cries out. But his father reassures him: ‘In dürren Blättern säuselt ...”

“... and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he renamed after his wife, Beatrice) that he buzzed Balmoral Castle. Pickens talked like his name sounded, describing the head of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), Sir Frank Kearton, as ...”

“... City. A striking recent example is the fantastic ‘relocation’ payment of £431,000 made to Mr Peter Aikens, chief executive of the drinks firm Matthew Clark. The company decided to shift its headquarters from Guildford to Somerset (about a hundred miles) and Aikens had to move house. Almost as soon as he moved, his company started predicting losses. It ...”

“... struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000), which devoted a chapter to his formative adventures in the Caribbean and Central America together with his wife ...”

“... conversing on the subject of ‘murder will out’, and one of them tells a story about a woman of King’s Lynn who confessed to having killed her husband when she saw a play about a similar crime:Sitting to behold a tragedy …Acted by players travelling that way,Wherein a woman that had murtherd hersWas ever haunted with her husband’s ghost …She was so ...”

“... did not know that Franco would die in November. I did not know, nor did anybody else, that the new king was a democrat and took the view that democracy should not be introduced slowly but in one fell swoop. I did not know that within a year of Franco’s death the names of the streets in the old city would be put up in Catalan, the language he had banned, that ...”