“... Nigeria and telling Nigerians how to behave: two burdens, perhaps, a double yoke. Like Aluko (or Henry Fielding), Miss Emecheta is happy to halt her pacey narrative and tell the reader bluntly what she thinks of her characters and life in general. This technique, the sermon in parenthesis, is acceptable in skilful story-tellers, like Miss ...”

“... called Victor in most versions of this story, including Mary Shelley’s, here called Henry? Why is his friend called Victor? The bereaved father of the little girl drowned by the monster because he thought she would float like a flower – something seems to have happened to the abnormal criminal brain he is supposed to possess – is Ludwig in ...”

“... or whale, can be imposed in accordance with the requirements of policy. At Elsinore, narrative power quickly turns into political power and the battle of authority involves a deadly contest for authorship. Both kings, Hamlet and Claudius, vie to impose their version of events on the raw material of regicide and ...”

“... begin multilateral negotiations based on Resolution 242. But the Geneva conference fell apart when Henry Kissinger took control of the diplomatic process in order to consolidate the role of the US as the sole peace-broker in the region. Washington was committed to fostering bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations between Israel and its neighbouring ...”

“... painted bright glossy colours, as if to make up for the gloom’. Yet the Old City was once where power was located; K.K. has kept in his new house the carved doors from the old family home there. What Husna really wants are diamond drop earrings, and to shop in expensive stores – but these are tokens of privilege K.K. doesn’t offer. She has seen the ...”

“... as foreign secretary, had been her husband’s boss.) She is kinder about the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, who, before digging up Nineveh for the British Museum, enjoyed Bakhtiari hospitality for two palpitating years, which he described in his Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. She makes passing allusion to the documentary film Grass ...”

“... of a ruling class who had studied the applications of death throughout human history and had power to apply that knowledge’. Executions both united the several parts of government and rammed home the lesson: ‘Respect private property.’ Hangings therefore represented a conflict ‘of the powerful and the propertied against the weak and the ...”

“... its eight adjoining villages. ‘We cannot allow this primitive, irresponsible and expansionist power to seize control of sources from which we draw an essential part of our fuel,’ Anthony Eden remarked when he was prime minister. The monotonously hostile tone of Aburish’s opening chapters is rather a pity since he has excellent contacts in the Arab ...”

“... to tensions and conflicts within pre-revolutionary society, and better attuned to the political power of the new technology of the era, the printing press. It also had less closely related rivals – and these approaches to the past had huge implications for the understanding of 17th-century politics. One was the history of political thought, which ...”

“... inaugural address with claims to have decisively shaped what followed came in 1841 when William Henry Harrison – ‘Old Tippecanoe’ – was so keen to show he was capable of observing the proprieties that he delivered a two-hour disquisition on constitutional government without a coat or hat in the cold and wet Washington winter. He caught a chill and ...”

“... Paisley – his thrawnness cracking under Tony Blair’s barrage of blandishments – entered into power-sharing with Sinn Féin. This provoked the secession from the DUP of Jim Allister, who established an ultra-Paisleyite party, Traditional Unionist Voice. But despite Paisley’s volte-face, Northern Ireland’s unionists – especially its dominant ...”

“... people, often from Jewish, Irish, Italian or mixed ethnic backgrounds, who weren’t born into power and money and had little experience in business or government. Like careerists everywhere, these professionals with degrees in international relations or history tended to logroll. Much of their work involved legitimising their own employment. For decades ...”

“... to a country where the black-white ratio is quite the reverse of what it is in the US. (When Henry Ford, on last visiting his investments in South Africa, was questioned about his company’s policy on black employment, he actually boasted of Ford’s ‘proud record towards minorities’.)Despite Adam and Moodley’s quotation, such strictures do not ...”

“... people are bent out of shape by their hidden selves. There is something of another contemporary, Henry Green, in Johnson’s invigorating harshness. As Elsie passes on her way to school, Parsons ‘gave her a sidelong glance, sniffing up the hairs in his nose. Sidey little runt, he thought.’ Elsie, abruptly adolescent, is in love with her art teacher, Miss ...”

“... for I do not intend to rule over heretics.’ Despite more sympathetic recent treatments such as Henry Kamen’s in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (1997), in Protestant minds the Inquisition remains Philip’s lasting memorial, and not without reason.Philip’s English reign has been virtually erased from national memory. Rady himself, in his ...”