“... Is it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde, and Widdow in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? Nay more, drinke togither: yea, and that which is a further matter; utter their minds, chuse Husbands, and censure Complections; and all this in a quiet and friendly sort, betweene themselves and the pinte-pot ...”

“... some Islamic concepts to the Yazidis even though they never converted them. One such missionary may have been the person Yazidis revere as the founder of their religion, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir. Records suggest that he was an 11th-century Sufi preacher, though Yazidis reject the idea that he was a Muslim: they think of him as an earthly manifestation of one ...”

“... but the Times was hardly the representative of the popular press Lawson takes it to be. The same may apply to his evidence for the prominent part he believes Tasmania played in contemporary British culture as the main source of his ‘extermination discourse’: a couple of landscape painters, with tiny natives usually placed – significantly, he thinks ...”

“... surely Attlee’s most important speech, after Chamberlain, deserted by ninety of his own MPs in May 1940, appealed to Attlee to join him in a national government. Attlee’s reply (‘Prime minister, our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either’) was what made Churchill prime minister – as fateful ...”

“... and that the establishment of an oracular shrine on the site where it remained for a millennium may well have been directly linked to the presence there of mildly trance-inducing emissions, which would be regarded as a divine gift, proof of Apollo’s presence, and carefully fostered on that basis. There was, as Scott admits, ‘a belief in a connection ...”

“... won’t be a Maidan in Russia.’* Ukraine has lost the war, but what the war has done to Russia may be even worse. For years now there has been speculation about a ‘party of war’, which periodically stages provocations in order to push the president into decisive action. The party of war was said to have manoeuvred Yeltsin into Chechnya and, more ...”

“... responsibility for winning a second war. When Churchill did invite him into the war cabinet in May 1940, however, he refused, perhaps partly out of pique that the nation had turned to Churchill rather than him, and thereafter gave the strong impression that he was expecting Churchill to fail, at which point there would have to be a negotiated ...”

“... sorcery, such as manuals of charms or collections of poisonous toads and powders’. By the end of May, ‘he had no such evidence.’ But the trial did not end there. He continued to pursue a ‘confession’. A confrontation on 26 July revealed the limits of von Gülchen’s authority. He summoned all those who thought Schmieg had poisoned Fessler, though ...”

“... right?’ Nora demurs: ‘Not one bit.’ The three adults have dinners together. Nora decides she may be in love with women and nearly confesses her love for Sirena before her lesbian friends talk her down. She dreams of the possibility of moving in with the Shahids and establishing a sort of gynocracy, perhaps in Vermont or Tuscany. Nora’s manic feeling ...”

“... does the later Sicilian Expedition, a similarly remote and costly venture – that such campaigns may have been motivated by a more pressing and practical need. The history of Persian relations with Egypt and the West from Cyrus to Alexander reveals certain fundamental weaknesses in the Achaemenid military machine: slowness in mobilisation, inadequately ...”

“... in the first five years of life which makes it impossible for the person to kill or steal.’ This may be a tall order to place on teachers, Whipple continued, but too bad: anyone who wanted to keep up with the latest scientific thinking must embrace ‘nurture’ and ‘kiss Nature goodbye’. For the next half-century, American psychologists ...”

“... Perhaps Howard was by now weary of managing her fiction; a lifetime’s effort at the typewriter may have blurred at times into that other effort, keeping house and home, keeping up with life. ‘The recipe said tinned salmon,’ she writes, but Clary ‘only had a tin of sardines. If she put mashed potato with them, and a splash of tomato ketchup and an egg ...”

“... at them and find them foolish; they’re not silly-billies, and he isn’t Rowan Atkinson. It may happen to work – in England – as comedy, or to suggest comedy to us because it’s broad or pitiless or unsubtle, but what if it is just broad and pitiless and unsubtle? Something is being clobbered so hard that we laugh – quite possibly mistakenly, and ...”

“... Mali to Toronto). Novels are more likely to be about adultery than the invasion of Iraq. Society may stretch no further than the confines of the family, with its sick fantasies and monstrous secrets, its squalid betrayals and mind-wrenching boredom. There is a host of psychically challenged families in classical Irish fiction, from Tristram Shandy and Castle ...”

“... marathon, as in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Their descriptions evoke the way a call girl may speak about her sense of being in control; they also fit with an argument about S&M that is gaining ground: that master/slave roles can be empowering for women. I am deeply sceptical about these arguments about sex and pain, but the theme is certainly present ...”