“... inscriptions there is a precise semi-circle, subdivided into quarters, with further divisions to mark the canonical hours. Later, the ‘shepherd’s dial’, an engraved cylinder mounted with a pointer to cast a shadow, made the technology portable.The thinking man’s timepiece was the astrolabe, first developed in Greece but significantly improved by Arab ...”

“... Loewe where, ‘for one brief shining moment’, King Arthur had enjoyed absolute power over his knights. (And Sir Lancelot over their women.) You might think that an invocation of mythical yet absolute monarchy would put bow-tied American scholars and editors on their guard. But you would be dead wrong. ‘Camelot’ is always cited without a breath of ...”

“... people’s stupidity. Helen, who’d been giving Sammy the silent treatment before getting off her mark and leaving him, was, you might imagine, the kind of woman who has lived exclusively in step with her man’s moods, habits and prejudices, one of those women whose lives are constituted by the paranoid behaviour of their men. The Kelman man is a regular ...”

“... who combined his love of dressing up and secret societies by refounding the medieval Knights Templar. Rosa was initiated into the order in a bizarre nocturnal ceremony involving cloaks and candles. While confused about the details, she felt ‘transfigured’ by her crusader experience, which ultimately ‘decided my vocation and my ...”

“... was there evidence of the class alliances that Khomeini had forged. To Kepel, the high-tide mark of Islamism was reached in 1989, with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, an Islamist regime taking power in Sudan, the fatwa against Rushdie, the FIS poised for government and the emergence of the Palestinian Muslim Brothers (Hamas) from the first ...”

“... only by his feats of arms. In another pageant he appeared as the pope, surrounded by household knights got up as cardinals. For a royal tournament at Cheapside, participants were ‘veiled in the likeness of the Tartars’, mimicking the distinctive headdresses of Mongol warriors.Arise, England promises us that kings were ‘real people, not pasteboard ...”

“... oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding ...”

“... their ears, their attitude hardened, their resistance to their captors’ authority becoming ‘a mark of their personal heroism and endurance’. While the nation had been busy losing the war, they were ‘almost desperate’, Steven Roberts, the New York Times reporter who covered the repatriation, wrote, to ‘believe the Vietnam War was worth it and that ...”

“... the second class of Rome’s elite, the ‘equestrian order’, although by this time Rome’s ‘knights’ knew far more about mining concessions and tax-farming than they did about how to handle a horse. The class above, the senatorial order, were several times fewer in number and much inclined to keep it that way, jealously guarding access to ...”

“... transactions that would have hit hedge funds. After a group of wealthy fans dubbed the ‘Red Knights’ failed in a £1 billion bid to buy Manchester United, Marshall wrote a paper for CentreForum arguing that fans should be allowed to buy football clubs. He had been one of the Red Knights.Many Lib Dems still remember ...”

“... to do so before their deaths). Taking such future honours into account, the group included several knights, two Nobel laureates, two poet laureates, three regius professors, two masters of Cambridge colleges, as well as holders of the Order of Merit and other honours. Whether or not bringing together such a group of literary worthies seems the most obviously ...”

“... arming;each man knows exactly what he has to do. At dawn the attack began.‘For God and Santiago, knights,hit them hardily and with love.’Berend writes of ‘whitewashing’, but El Cid’s sainthood seems to have more to do with poetry, and its immortal ability to keep speaking to changing contexts. The Poema was meant to be sung aloud by the ...”

“... or where any such additions may have been put in. Parker has convinced himself that the sure mark of any added material is that some direct reference is made in it to Pierre as a working poet or novelist. And since, again in his view, all references of this kind only begin to occur about two thirds of the way into the novel, in Book XVII (‘Young ...”

“... Saul Alinksy, the Chicago-based community activist and author of Rules for Radicals (1971), Mark and Paul Engler (This Is an Uprising, 2016) and Srdja Popovic, the Serbian advocate of ‘laughtivism’ (Blueprint for Revolution, 2015): XR insists that its interventions should both be fun and poke fun. Gene Sharp, the author of The Politics of ...”