“... to honour as the play proceeded. As Dodsworth writes of the fight at the end, ‘an almost-King, an almost-reconciliation and an almost-duel naturally conspire together to produce “accidental judgments, casual slaughters”.’ The trouble is, as with some 19th-century reactions to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, reading Hamlet Closely Observed ...”

“... 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s useful and unpretentious book on the pre-Civil War rulers of England’s shires is entitled, not (as one would have expected a decade or two ago) The Rising Gentry or The Provincial Gentry, but The Puritan Gentry. His theme is not estate ...”

“... of provincial artisan stock. He was born in Exeter around 1547, the eldest of eight children of Richard Hilliard, a goldsmith, and Laurence Wall, the daughter of Richard’s former master (her name recurs in later generations of the family in the more sophisticated form of Laurentia). Much has been made of Hilliard’s ...”

“... to ensure Harington’s significance, if not his fame, the manuscript from which the printer Richard Field set Harington’s translation of Ariosto survives in the British Library: it tells us more about the ways in which Elizabethan printers regularised authors’ spelling and punctuation than any other document from the period. When Harington’s ...”

“... at Haileybury College, a training school for the East India Company. He became a member of the King of Clubs, a dining society for Whig luminaries, and was friendly with the editors of the Edinburgh Review. His fame grew with the publication of a vastly expanded second edition in 1803, which substantiated the basic principle of population with references ...”

“... to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called this ...”

“... in a new culture based not on the city but on the tribe, not on the state but on the person of the king. The Roman World is fundamentally archaeological in its interests, and the contributors are archaeologists and historians. ‘Society’ comes in as Part Nine, and Chapter 29 is about society and the artist, but what is conspicuously absent is any serious ...”

“... as terrorism, holy war, human rights and the status of women. In his entry on Terrorism, Augustus Richard Norton argues that the ‘deliberate and random uses of violence for political ends against protected (i.e. non-combatant) groups’ has historic roots in the Middle East, but is far from being exclusive to one confession. He maintains that the first ...”

“... demandingly, how it avoids invalidating itself. This shows up the advantage of the philosopher-king model, which can at least base its method of reaching political decisions on the philosophers’ claims to know best. Matters are made worse by the leaden style in which Between Facts and Norms is written. If poetry is what is lost in ...”

“... religious reawakening, sold well and was made into a sentimental movie starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte. Backed by a reasonably lavish promotional campaign (‘In a CHANGING world, this motion picture is joyously dedicated to the heartwarming fact that BABIES still come in the same old, wonderfully old-fashioned way!’), the film was profitable and ...”

“... mostly took Hemingway at his macho word and accepted the Life magazine image of him as a bearded king. It took the shock of his suicide to show the thin ice on which his sovereignty stood, and the black depths below.) Despite the formal and practical advantages of waiting, financially it is better to strike while the body is still warm. Editors and agents ...”

“... friends and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the Nazis, Corrie ten Boom, books by a disabled ...”

“... and the university; about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed ...”

“... Israeli rule. Surely it would have been better, as the intelligence men had concluded, to allow King Hussein to continue integrating Palestinians in Jordan, thus eroding Palestinian identity? There was not a single area, during the 1967 war, in which the military behaved in a way that was consistent with its earlier analysis. Some might call this evidence ...”

“... not a talker’ (a phrase with an interesting provenance – it goes back to the First Murderer in Richard III, by way of Bob Dole in his failed bid for the presidency in 1996). But it’s a line that unwittingly draws attention to the intellectual as well as the rhetorical limits of her candidacy. ‘We can get back on the path we were on,’ she ...”