“... In January the government had been defeated on a parliamentary motion submitted by the Radical MP John Roebuck which called for an inquiry into the conduct or misconduct of the war. Aberdeen resigned and, to Queen Victoria’s understandable distaste, was replaced by Palmerston. A traditional view of him as sabre-rattling ...”

“... goes hand in hand with excessive documentation requirements and weak or non-existent privacy laws – are a different story. And the technology is improving. In September 2010, satellite photos of Abbottabad showed a man who looked a lot like Osama bin Laden exercising in a yard; the satellite’s facial recognition system confirmed it was him. It’s ...”

“... Brisbane went down as good for nothing. Misleading information could wreck a business. In 1848, John Beardsley sued the Mercantile Agency for slander in a case that lasted 23 years, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and undercuts American privacy rights to this day. The story began with a routine entry: Beardsley’s wife was about to file for ...”

“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... Register called it ‘Silly Billy’s Tomfoolery’ and dismissed its ‘indecent trash’. John Bull said that ‘the dirty abominations of the raffs of literature are far below notice,’ then devoted three issues to reviews, spoofs and comments on the book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a ...”

“... computations have too. But chips had become so small that they were starting to run up against the laws of physics.Parallel processing instead performs calculations not in sequence, but simultaneously. Rather than working through one huge calculation, it works through lots of small calculations at the same time. On YouTube, you can find the MythBusters, an ...”

“... and the citizenry cannot hold them accountable for flaunting [sic] environmental and labour laws,’ John Blessing Karumbidze observes. Though they often detest the World Bank and other citadels of Western power, many of these activists realise that the conditions Western lenders impose on African governments do help ...”

“... with anarchism? The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille ...”

“... the Heseltine campaign for leader in 1990 – Clark, the tycoon James Goldsmith and the zoo-keeper John Aspinall arranged a dinner with Conrad Black, owner of the Telegraph, to try to persuade him to order his (entirely independent) editor to stop backing Heseltine. Black refused, but we are left in no doubt that it is at dinner parties such as these that ...”

“... Throughout the Middle Ages England was a Continental power; during much of that time, our laws were written in French. Over half of Shakespeare’s plays are set on the Continent. Donizetti and Verdi certainly regarded English literature as part of their own heritage ... Our architecture is obviously part of European architecture, just as our ...”

“... and the disciplining of social life. In particular, they demonstrated how the reform of penal laws and institutions enhanced rather than diminished the power of legal authorities and further subordinated deviant individuals and the social classes from which they were drawn. The policing and punishment of offenders ceased to be a social function ever more ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... about riding-masters, and therefore is afflicted by rentier-guilt. (‘Recurrent as malaria,’ John Lehmann wrote in 1955, ‘a bout of rentier-guilt laid me low.’) Because Auden’s ideal or preferred or postulated reader has this socio-political identity, he is particularly easy to recognise; Trotter’s ingenuity and sensitivity are more taxed when ...”

“... on conclusions reached in the book I had written. I don’t want to interfere with a discussion by John Bayley which the paper will be publishing shortly: but I would like to diarise a little about this piece of Antipodean duality. Like other strange stories of the genre, it both embodies and attracts coincidence. A strong pang was felt when my eye travelled ...”

“... and Hispanic voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. He did better among white voters than John Kerry had in 2004, but not by much: Kerry got 41 per cent, Obama 43 per cent. The brunt of the recession has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually ...”