“... and 1640, the Empire of the kings of Spain stretched from the Philippines to the shores of the North Sea. The 19th-century Russian Empire covered more territory and the British had a larger population, but no other European empire was spread so widely or embraced so many different peoples. This behemoth has conventionally been called the Spanish Empire. At ...”

“... perished in the nearby concentration camp. In Pretoria Haggard called in at the cemetery where Oom Paul (Kruger) was buried, along with ‘others I had known’. The diary does not identify these others, but Coan does, and provides a photograph of the memorial to a law officer’s wife by whom Haggard had a short-lived child, Ethel Rider, buried alongside. The ...”

“... to the top floor via express elevator, himself becomes in effect the message, that evil capitalist Paul Newman can see his way to the ingenious stock scam which drives the plot on towards last-minute angelic intervention. The arrangement by phalanx required by lift protocol has the great virtue of precluding conversation. Cinema’s best elevator scenes ...”

“... life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks took their pleasures where they could find them. For the regular soldiers this usually meant the brothels of Kingston. On return to camp they were required to attend the grandly named Prophylactic Ablution Centre. Those who failed to ...”

“... the Circus at Bath, with its giant acorns, built between 1754 and 1768 to an esoteric design. John North noted in Stonehenge that the layout of the site is much more likely oriented not towards midsummer sunrise but midwinter sunset, which one might well think a time of fear and propitiation for Neolithic farmers rather than the joyous life celebration of ...”

“... of conscience over papal power prefigured the Vatican Council’s work so strikingly that Pope Paul VI could speak of it as ‘Newman’s Council’. Like many bodies of writing, Newman’s work was lent its most vital significance by events which lay in its future. Newman was aware that he was regarded in some circles as a saint, but thought he was quite ...”

“... for a war against slavery was the threat that slavery might be extended to the new territories of North America. That would diminish the hope that democracy could civilise itself in America by ‘lifting artificial weights from all shoulders’. It would also destroy the exemplary value of the United States as a large republic that governed itself peacefully ...”

“... member of this last group, my sister announced to the committee that its writer had borrowed, via Paul Virilio, a passage from Gaston Bachelard in which a water-bound creature is described as a ‘principle of vertigo’, dying at every instant as it sheds its substance. Melissa argued that the surfer’s symbolic relation to the shark confirmed Virilio’s ...”

“... What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl ...”

“... the publisher who got Beckett, Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet onto British bookshelves, Calder is a North-American Scot made in England. Ever since the Scottish Scots started coming down to London with the proverbial half-crown in their breeches in the 19th century, many of the most innovative publishers have been insider-outsiders. Typically, such publishers ...”

“... known use of the word in English was in 1230, when an Oxford street was named Gropecunt Lane. Paul Dacre, that nice man who edits the Daily Mail, has become famous in recent times for ‘double-cunting’: a colleague, usually male, will be ticked off via a thunderous, compound deployment of the Old Frisian. ‘You call that a good cunting headline, you ...”

“... The documentary film The Mirage Men, which came out in 2013, begins by telling the story of Paul Bennewitz, a businessman from Albuquerque who was driven mad by spies in the 1980s. Bennewitz had noticed strange lights and sounds coming from a nearby military base and reported them to staff there, who assigned him to an agent called Richard Doty. Doty ...”

“... died in France in 1975. By then, Harry Rée was a teacher at Woodberry Down Comprehensive in North London, back doing the job he loved best. But a little over thirty years before, they had been together in the French Resistance. Harry (‘Henri’ or ‘César’) was an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), parachuted in by London to organise ...”

“... and Edwardian ‘antis’ were far from being advocates of what Marx’s indolent son-in-law Paul Lafargue called ‘the right to be lazy’. Anyone hoping to uncover a hidden history of female hedonism will have to look elsewhere. The antis thought women should work from dawn till dusk for the public weal – but without the tools men had to ...”

“... the papacy threatened to escalate into armed conflict. After his election as pope in May 1605, Paul V sought to overturn restrictions on church-building and the unlicensed transfer of properties to the Church, while also seeking to deny the republic’s right to try clergy indicted on criminal charges in secular courts. The Venetians resisted, resulting in ...”