“... Mann’s affidavit, which stated that he was on his way to Princeton to meet up with his father Thomas, and said he was ‘honoured to make the acquaintance of the son of so great a man’. Varian Fry was a stiff, rather priggish man, a spoilt only child who manipulated his parents with fake illnesses, was bullied at school and became known as a prankster ...”

“... civilising influence to William’s court’ rests on nothing much: pseudo-Ingulf again, and Thomas Rudborne writing centuries later. She may have persuaded William to allow a decent burial in 1075 for Queen Edith, Harold’s sister and Edward’s wife, but William was always careful about King Edward’s reputation, it being a vital part of his claim to ...”

“... woman is a frail thing and of weak discretion.’ ‘I like not a female Poetess at any hand,’ Thomas Powell writes in 1631. Rousseau in 1762 insists that ‘the entire education of women must be relative to men.’ And so on and so on and so on. Doesn’t even Chekhov’s treatment of the bookish wife niggle, in ‘Lady with Lapdog’? Why does he have to ...”

“... and gives the novel a starred review, praising its ‘charming’ recombination of the styles of Thomas Pynchon and Boris Vian and its ‘tender’, ‘childlike’ depiction of heterosexual love. Jack figures the Kirkus reviewer must be a woman, probably studying French, unduly influenced by Will’s touched-up author photo. Then comes a review in the New ...”

“... the American Legislative Exchange Council. The group is of Cold War vintage, founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett and Paul Weyrich, a Wisconsin native. (Weyrich also had a hand in starting the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.) By defining itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organisation, Alec eludes legal definitions of lobbying while ...”

“... Sea during the debates that immediately preceded the British-Irish Union. The Scottish politician Henry Dundas, an admirer of Smith and the prime mover behind the union, advanced an anti-feudalist rationale for British-Irish integration; and there were also echoes of Smith among Irish unionists, with Thomas Brook Clarke ...”

“... rhetoric of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William ...”

“... a few bombers were guillotined, others responded with further attacks. On 12 February 1894, Émile Henry, a 21-year-old friend of Fénéon, planted an explosive in Café Terminus at Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and injuring twenty. On 4 April another bomb tore up the Restaurant Foyot across from the Senate, and this time Fénéon was a suspect. After ...”

“... the Lord Coke from the place he now holdeth to be Chief Justice of England, and the Attorney [i.e. Henry Hobart] to succeed him, and the Solicitor [i.e. Bacon] the Attorney.First, it will strengthen the King’s causes greatly amongst the judges. For my Lord Coke will think himself near a Privy Councillor’s place, and thereupon turn obsequious.Secondly, the ...”

“... of piety never quite cracked. They approached several European rulers for help – including Henry VIII, who would have no truck with them – and in the end reluctantly accepted the only offer going. Malta was an informal part of Charles V’s newly acquired kingdom of Sicily. The main island and its smaller neighbour, Gozo, had very little water. The ...”

“... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... fiascos of psychohistory’, Gay seeks allies among orthodox social historians. Thus Keith Thomas is praised – for ‘speaking Freud without knowing it’. What a pity that, in a letter excerpted in the notes, Thomas distances himself from ‘the Master’. What a shame that Edmund Morgan, having learned so much ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise ...”

“... most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created ...”