“... play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual ...”

“... the gardens – reminded visitors of Covent Garden, or even St Mark’s Square. Garden buildings may be ephemeral, but with tens of thousands of visitors each season the orchestra building, the rotunda and the pillared saloon were some of the best-known examples of modern architecture in the country. Vauxhall became a showroom for British architecture and ...”

“... On 11 May 1831, a fastidious 25-year-old Norman aristocrat arrived in New York City with an assignment to report on American prisons for the French Ministry of Justice. Over the next nine months he travelled up the East Coast, down the Mississippi and through what was then the wild west of Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan ...”

“... the author’s identity, the author’s credentials, the date, the very words on the page – may be corrupted,’ and that, as a result, we should ‘proceed with extreme caution’. Wahrman is certainly right that cheap print was a chaos of variants: but that is precisely the problem with his thesis. Such ‘slips’ were everywhere. According to Early ...”

“... undergoes an expiatory death and resurrection. As Collins observes, the Teacher of Righteousness may be associated, like Jesus, with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, although the teacher ‘is not said to offer his life as ransom for many, or to suffer vicariously on their behalf’, and there is scant evidence that he was predicted to rise from the ...”

“... on the dangers of reading to women, Nymphomania, or a Treatise on Uterine Frenzy. Conspiracy may not be quite the right word, but no doubt there are some foundational inequities in written culture. Despite all the encouraging fathers and teachers and husbands there have ever been, Moderata isn’t being immoderate when she writes about ‘envy and ill ...”

“... of less than £2000, they proposed to pay the managing director alone £350 a year). But Cambridge may in any case have been an unwise place in which to launch a venture of this kind. The locals, it’s been suggested, were never likely to be enticed away from bathing in the Cam (and certainly not if the alternative cost two and six). Ferdinand Mount, who ...”

“... American politics is propelled by laws quite different from any known in Europe. A great deal may be traced back to the elections of the 1960s. Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, in their study Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions (1999), found that the old religious split between voters was deepest in 1960, as ...”

“... doctrine and financial prudence. Defoe himself was no stranger to exotic adventure, even though he may never have left his native country. The son of a prosperous London tallow chandler, he set himself up as a haberdasher, ran a profitable brick and tile factory, dabbled in marine insurance, imported and exported a range of goods and, as a convinced ...”

“... of billions due to all the liability claims filed in the wake of the wildfires.The Kincade Fire may have been sparked by PG&E’s equipment, but it’s also true that PG&E is operating under extraordinary circumstances wrought at least in part by forces outside their control. New housing developments have sprung up in the bucolic, fire-prone landscape of ...”

“... in September 1931, or its navy’s assault on Shanghai in January 1932. All three answers may be correct, since the Japanese army and navy had different policies and objectives, and were fully capable of starting wars without consulting each other, and indeed of starting wars to gain advantage over each other. For other historians, the important ...”

“... to suit the large number of ex-Liberal voters who supported it. That government collapsed in May 1940. Churchill’s wartime administration was a genuine coalition of virtually all the country’s political forces and after its break-up we had no coalitions until 2010. British politicians from the dominant parties of the day have never been keen on ...”

“... last few weeks as chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to the candidates vying to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and asked them to pledge that, if elected, they would retain his target of bringing down national debt as a percentage of GDP. ‘If we do not commit to getting our debt down after a nine-year run of uninterrupted economic ...”

“... independent experts are sceptical, citing evidence that the camps are still in operation – some may even be expanding. Social media platforms are still full of posts asking for information about missing Uyghur relatives. Among those detainees who are released, many are sent straight from the camps to factories where they are forced to work under what the ...”

“... here. When his uncle Hugo is diagnosed with brain cancer, Toby recognises that caring for him may aid his own recovery. Toby and Melissa move into Ivy House, where Toby and his cousins, Leon and Susanna, used to spend summers under Hugo’s relaxed supervision. While Melissa is at work, Toby helps Hugo, a genealogist, with his research, but this ...”