“... view of the period, which takes the idea of an English Renaissance to be elitist and aestheticist. Richard Halpern​ knows that European tragedy has often followed the Greeks. His Eclipse of Action starts with an account of the Oresteia and ends with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a viscerally shocking play which reworks atrocities from tragic tradition. As turning ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... That evening Ehrlichman and Haldeman resigned from the President’s staff. Simultaneously, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, revealed that on the President’s orders the CIA had prepared a profile of Ellsberg, which by law it was forbidden to do where an American citizen was concerned. By now it was beginning to dawn on Judge Byrne that if this ...”

“... I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was ...”

“... and wild-westish the process became, take a look at a book by a former Texas mortgage broker, Richard Bitner, called Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender.† The invention which made it possible for the lending to become so reckless was securitisation: the process by which loans were added together and sold on to other institutions as packages of debt. This ...”

“... semitic peoples’, as Magnes called it, though he too expected large-scale Jewish immigration. Richard Crossman, who was a member of the commission, concluded that Magnes ‘represented nothing real in Palestine’. This was sadly confirmed by Hourani’s saying that a binational state could work only ‘if a certain spirit of co-operation and trust exists ...”

“... the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely ...”

“... a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a ...”

“... a selection of 400 (out of four thousand surviving) letters by Jack London, with the help of King Hendricks, a professor at Utah and a close friend of Charmian’s. When the selection appeared in 1966, the first sentence firmly declared the subject to be ‘the son of John and Flora Well-man London’. The name ‘Chaney’ is not to be found anywhere in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that no future monarch could break it? The political loyalty of bishops was always conditional, after the Reformation as before. That loyalty had looked doubtful in the ...”

“... 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 ...”