“... currency of account. It was a major coup for what was then a small commercial centre. There was no king’s or duke’s head on the florin. Florence had long since banned nobility from involvement in its government, which was now republican, the nine executive members elected by lot from among the patrician community every two months, so that no one person ...”

“... dictates of politicians and to the delusions of popular culture? No one could be sure. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter brilliantly described the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics: your opponents weren’t simply wrong, they were conspiring against you, mobilising dark forces to suppress free and rational thought. The joining up of psychiatry and history ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... a Pashtun lineage and because unlike Zahir Shah – another possibility – he hadn’t once been king. Days before the invasion the CIA had told Karzai, then in Pakistan, to get on his motorbike and enter the country. With his past support for the Taliban absolved, the Americans gave him a security team. After he was informed by a satellite phone call from ...”

“... writing, and eventually managed to move Margaret and his children to the city, in 1830, to 7 Great King Street. But he was never really out of trouble, ending up more than once in the Canongate Tollbooth, for debt. The pattern of death and loss among children which had shaped his early years came back to repeat itself, with the death of his son William, in ...”

“... it as a pharmakon, meaning a beneficial ‘recipe’ for both memory and wisdom. However, the king who has the authority to accept the pharmakon hears the word differently and is suspicious of the addictive drug with its more probable narcotic effects.The inventor of écriture is thus accused of smuggling drugs. The Czechoslovak authorities who arrested ...”

“... contains miniature reproductions of most of Duchamp’s work. Here are the major paintings The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes and The Bride, both from 1912, and the notorious Nude Descending a Staircase of the same year, which was the scandal of the New York Armory Show in 1913, and is often taken to represent the arrival of the 20th century in ...”

“... compared the action to that of an animal in his zoos. The Christian editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams, who has lately, after a lifetime spent in the publication of sneers and lies, gone to his reward in the shape of a column in the country’s most snobbish newspaper, came out with a piece headed ‘All’s well that ends Elwes.’ Masters is ...”

“... Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that was a distinctive feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the ...”

“... finally published in 1920, by which time the German Empire had shattered. Max, once hailed as ‘King of Hamburg’, was out of favour, having been falsely accused of bankrolling the Bolshevik Revolution and Warburg was in a clinic in Jena. A footnote to the essay lamented that illness prevented him from ‘enlarging on the Janus-faced historic sense, the ...”

“... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English ...”

“... unofficial and convenient way even if at first it is a little forced’. But the role of the Good King soon began to pall. At Oxford, he wrote to a friend: ‘I wish to God I’d been brought up in an intelligent, sane (but not too stiff and British) middle-class family with a close connection with some kind of work ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in 1964, but cultural studies proper only really started after Hall took over as director a few years later: ‘What is the discipline? We didn’t have one. In a way we had to construct it. Not because we had huge ambitions to be ...”