“... because he has run out of animal comparisons. It took a while for this manner to change. King John, a bit later, has some intensities of a sort not to be found in its predecessors, but it remembers the old redundancies. Here Salisbury is protesting against the King’s decision to be crowned a second time: Therefore, to be possess’d with double ...”

“... and replace it with a roguish gallery of ‘freemasons and republicans’ – people like John Toland, Anglo-Irish freethinker, troublemaker and chancer, and inventor of the notoriously slippery concept of ‘pantheism’. The key text of Jacob’s Enlightenment was not the hugely expensive Encyclopédie, but an anonymous pamphlet called the Traité ...”

“... is not one of substance, but one of timing. The formulation by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of an intellectual defence of the new American system of representative government came at the end of the revolutionary process, and in the aftermath of the drawing up of a new Constitution. Sieyès set out the core of his ideas at the very beginning of ...”

“... of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA ‘brigadier’, ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker ...”

“... the Department of Health and Social Security to block imports from the US.In the same year, Dr John Craske, director of the Public Health Laboratory Service, co-ordinated a ‘hepatitis study’ to establish which blood products were most likely to transmit the various strains of hepatitis. Forty-five pupils at Treloar’s were enrolled: each was given ...”

“... decisive. At the height of the civil war, Cuba had more than 50,000 troops stationed in Angola. John Stockwell, a CIA agent-turned-whistleblower, explained in 1978:We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the US that was escalating the fighting … We put advisers in, they answered with advisers. We put in Zairian para-commando ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... It probably doesn’t help that the IPs we get to hear about are usually the celebrities: Elton John and David Furnish; Annie Leibovitz; Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Surrogacy is one of those subjects on which ‘colour-blind – white – feminism’ tends not to mince words. ‘A human-rights violation’, the journalist Julie Bindel called it in 2018 ...”

“... anchorite St Alphege, who in Rees-Mogg’s exegesis was England’s first tax martyr; and John Locke, whom he characterised with cynical vagueness as a champion of the people against government. That speech set the key for his parliamentary excursions into history and literature, armed with the kind of cute patriotic simpleness one might have found in ...”

“... emergence … is shattered’. Barker starts with Patrick walking up to the gates of St John’s College, Cambridge. This, we say to ourselves, is where it all began.Harman prefaces her biography with a scene in the present tense. It is, she tells us, ‘1 September 1843 and a 27-year-old Englishwoman is alone at the Pensionnat Héger in ...”

“... are occupied. There’s no sign of the superstore, but the promised food outlets are open: Papa John’s Pizza, Burger King and Greggs. One evening I drove down a dark country lane on the edge of Wyberton to the home of Richard Austin, who led the Bypass Independents to victory in 2007. He’s in his eighties now. His wife, Alison, is also involved in local ...”

“... in his Ciuile Conuersation (1586), simply part of his master; and ‘to be no part of any body’, John Donne wanly observed – having failed to secure a place to which he had ‘submitted himself’ – was ‘to be nothing’. By the same token, the public identity of a lord was dependent on his retinue of servants, whose principal function was to display ...”

“... UK is all about the size of the goody bags we each get in the here and now. The panel, chaired by John Hills, was established in October 2008 under the aegis of the Government Equalities Office. The Hills report is everything the Milburn report is not: analytical, systematic and free from feel-good rhetoric. The panel was required to explore the ways in which ...”

“... that Roosevelt had had a change of heart. French expatriates in Washington, notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s ...”

“... piano duo of the 1950s and 1960s – virtuosic together in anything from Mozart to Poulenc and John Cage – seems oddly relevant here. Yes, it required the two of them to take Bernhardt on, rhetorically speaking; yet partnered thus, they also had between them enough nervy gay boy wit and fleet camp dexterity to keep the Divine One from blowing ...”