“... interest themselves in the “economic and social forces which underlie the history of people” may overlook.’ Here the situation is a little different. There is a historian of Antiquity who has argued lucidly and at length on the possible relationship between early Greek commerce and coinage, and the capacity for abstract thinking which found ultimate ...”

“... supposed ‘goals’ of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946-56, the realisation of which may be seen in A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, these and other historians wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn ...”

“... these problems afflict Asian populations in other cities and do not usually lead to rioting. It may be, however, that the tolerance of Bradford Muslims had been stretched beyond breaking point by the issue of prostitution. Lumb Lane, a notorious red-light area in the Manningham district, has seen a growing confrontation between the pimps and prostitutes who ...”

“... in Britain after Thatcher, an amazing proportion of national treasure invested in the sciences. It may be spent unwisely on weapons or on grandiose enterprises like the human genome project. It may be necessary to do a lot of toadying about practical applications of pure research when asking for patronage. But public and ...”

“... who when he had done the deed allowed himself to be apprehended on the spot. This was on 11 May 1812 – Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die has been published to mark the bicentenary. He was examined, tried and hanged within a week. During this short time he never wavered in his account of his motive, and his insistence that he wasn’t part of a ...”

“... public’. Ordinary MPs and the press thought they had a better grasp of popular opinion, but they may not have done. This was a serious matter: if the government was to take the people along with it, it had to know how they felt and what kinds of appeal they would respond to. It was with this in mind that in December it set up a brand new Home Intelligence ...”

“... already written ‘a compendium of Universal History’ at the age of eight.) One of his reasons may have been to escape from the traumas, as he saw them, of family life. The past was all done, finished, secure; it couldn’t let him down like his mother and siblings had. ‘In the dead there is no change.’ And it couldn’t answer back. (Surely there are ...”

“... This undistinguished poem is the only one of Shakespeare’s sonnets written in tetrameter and may pun on Ann Hathaway’s name in its closing couplet: ‘I hate, from hate away she threw,/And saved my life saying not you.’ Andrew Gurr was the first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth ...”

“... thought to how a museum suddenly endowed with many millions should be organised or directed and he may never have realised how important it was to protect such an institution from falling into the hands of people who were only equipped to run (or suited to front) giant corporations. An intelligent and analytical history of the Getty Museum and the Getty Trust ...”

“... Despite​ Theresa May’s calls during the election campaign for national unity, Britons don’t really live in a nation-state but in a multinational composite state, whose lineaments were set in the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, and the Hanoverian accession in 1714 ...”

“... increase in Europeans’ food consumption and demand for consumer goods. And this rise in demand may well in turn have contributed to the increasing number of European trading voyages across the world’s oceans in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Even traumatic shifts in human history can have mixed and sometimes useful consequences. So epic changes are ...”

“... will be perpetual, and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smiles upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future buccaneers. That last bit, about ‘expense’ and ‘use’, remained the gist of the objection to them by British policy-makers (the people at the Foreign Office, for example); together ...”

“... remain, and who knows whether the literary issues that Sutherland is able to chronicle as past may not come back again? If they do, it is very hard to believe that the ‘public good defence’ offered by Section 4 of the Act could any longer be seriously thought to provide a respectable way of resolving them. On the question of nuisance, the obtrusive ...”

“... to rearrange memories, impose some sort of order or pattern. In the same way that a novelist may write about his own life, disguising it as a tale about imaginary people, autobiography may be a sly form of fiction. And it follows that the success of an autobiography depends on whether or not he makes a good story of ...”

“... spearhead of the campaign to shame Ukraine’s government into letting Tymoshenko go abroad. On 10 May, a few days after pictures appeared showing bruises and grazes on Tymoshenko’s skin, caused, Tymoshenko said, by a beating at the hands of prison staff, Merkel raised the stakes. In a speech to the Bundestag, she bracketed Ukraine with Belarus as a European ...”