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“... whale is a ‘tyrant’ who falls victim to the plots of little fishes, and finally a ‘slain king’ whose death goes unrevenged. In these respects he could be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have ...”

“... many paradoxical phenomena in terms of individual rationality. In The Presidential Election Game,1 Steven Brams has explained the confrontation between Nixon and Justices Burger and Blackmun over the White House tapes in terms of a strategic conflict, where the actual and rationally predictable outcome was worse for both sides than another available ...”

“... from the Dutch in the Napoleonic wars, found there was only one local lord left to deal with. King Vikrama Rajasinha believed he could hold the city of Kandy, which is situated in the jungle of the central highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was ...”

“... and employment. His trip to Rome was ‘not a tourist trip, but a political trip on behalf of the king’: he was angling for an ambassadorship, which he never received. Instead he was appointed mayor of Bordeaux, a ‘political compromise that was made at his expense’. His mayoral term was not a success; caught between irreconcilable pressure groups, he ...”

“... some text apparently very remote from the central interest and move in from that periphery on to King Lear, or whatever the ‘literary’ work in question happens to be. That there can be a genuinely fresh look at texts for the most part already well-known to historians, including literary historians, may be seen from ...”

“... graduate students. Many of them, including Barbara Fields, James McPherson, Louis Harlan and Steven Hahn, would go on to celebrated careers of their own. Most studied the 19th-century South; as a result, the Festschrift they produced for Woodward in 1982 has a coherence such books usually lack. Like many other ‘star’ professors, Woodward was often on ...”

“... called themselves Franci, whether or not they were French-speaking or subjects of the French king, and so those they encountered in the east called them by that name, transliterated into Greek or Arabic. Westerners relished the name’s ambiguity: in their contemporary parlance Franci had come to mean French, and Francia, France, but Franci also denoted ...”

“... had the choice of superannuated handbooks translated from German or Russian or the works of Steven Runciman – which, though palpably Hellenophile, reinforce the impression that Byzantium matters as and when it pertains to a Latin, Western European history. Anthony Kaldellis will have none of this. He reprehends the terms ‘Byzantine’ and ...”

“... transformed a battle between white people over political rights into a black revolution of sorts. (Steven Hahn recently made the same point about the role of slaves in the American Civil War.*) But given the mixed motives and inconsistency of British commanders, Schama’s repeated insistence on Britain’s formative role in all this is perplexing. What was ...”

“... male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a wider range of ambiguous interpretations, affects and ...”

“... cobra-strikes all the more lethal. The precocious brilliance of his first book, He That Plays the King, written when he was 23 and tapped for glory with a foreword by Orson Welles. His triumphant stint as theatre columnist for the Observer. His championing of Look Back in Anger, the play that blew the tea cosies off the English stage and became the rude ...”

“... for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white ...”

“... how many people were killed.In December 2021, the UN commissioned a team – Kaari Betty Murungi, Steven Ratner and Radhika Coomaraswamy – to investigate violations of international humanitarian law during the war. But the Ethiopian government refused them access to anywhere except Addis Ababa, and the Eritrean government refused to engage at all. Tigray ...”

“... Dancer from the Dance, George Whitmore’s Nebraska, Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of ...”

“... to Egypt’s national pride: the country has been a republic since Nasser’s overthrow of King Farouk, and few people are keen on its becoming a ‘republican monarchy with houmus’, in the words of the novelist Khaled Al Khamissi. Born in 1963 and known to friends as ‘Jimmy’, Gamal spent his early adult life in London, working at Bank of America ...”