“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... They had royal connections. Pol Pot’s cousin was a palace dancer and ‘favourite wife’ to a king. An elder brother found employment as a lackey, and the future dictator joined him at court when he was six. As Kiernan points out, ‘he never worked a rice field or knew much of village life ... few Cambodian childhoods were so removed from their ...”

“... jurist who served on the Court during the country’s brief moment of independence under King Faisal in 1920. Later, he wrote a book on the French Mandate that robbed Syria of its independence. Jacques said that his family could not just walk away from all this. Things were getting better in Syria, he believed, but he feared that American ...”

“... going anywhere fast, no matter how gentrified the area. Tower Hamlets, according to its MP, Oona King, is the nation’s heroin capital. More long-term unemployed people live here than in any other borough, and many of them are young Bangladeshi men. These guys are Cockneys by geography and in self-image too. Walls and bus shelters are daubed with gang names ...”

“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities. Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the ...”

“... the interval I stood in line for the men’s room with the philosopher Tom Nagel, the sociologist Richard Sennett, the poet Fred Seidel and the conservative sage William Buckley. I suppose Brendel’s intellectual and technical mastery is about the only kind to which sensible people of almost every description want to pay tribute, even if to do so involves a ...”

“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

“... school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and masculine (agreeing in gender with Rex), because ‘the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neuter.’ (In ...”

“... to see its appeal. Eraserhead might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben Barenholtz, the king of New York’s midnight movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early ...”

“... unrecorded meeting of the ‘Inner Cabinet’ four months earlier (24 July). The attendance of Richard Mulcahy at that restricted meeting is, I am sure, correctly ascribed to the fact that he was Chief of Staff of the Army, while the presence of Erskine Childers is explained on the grounds that he was Substitute Director of Publicity. However, in the list ...”

“... a protocol, or draft treaty, was ready for signature in Montreal. The chief American negotiator, Richard Benedick, conceding that the science was still far from precise, pleaded for a rapid response. ‘If we are to err in designing measures to protect the ozone layer, then let us, conscious of our responsibility to future generations, err on the side of ...”

“... anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish clichés – Jesuits in cowl and robe conspiring to set a Catholic king on the English throne, or Jews drinking the blood of a Christian child? The anti-Catholic swipe would be looked on as a bizarre eccentricity, of no controversial interest at all; the anti-Jewish one might prompt alarm as a symptom of cultural regression; but ...”

“... projects. Among the constructors, there was some outright fraud: George Hudson, the ‘railway king’, ran his business as a pyramid scheme. By 1850, those £100 of shares were only worth £70, and speculators who’d failed to leave the party early were ruined. The point about railway mania isn’t that it opened people’s eyes to the folly of expecting ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”