“... most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even then, MBS’s biggest fans continued to ...”

“... and early 1590s, the so-called ‘pre-Shakespearean’ period. Not a single play by the sonneteer Thomas Watson remains, though he was described in 1592 as one whose ‘daily practyse and living’ was writing for the theatre. Thomas Nashe certainly wrote for the public playhouses in the early 1590s – his friend Greene ...”

“... France, at that moment emerging as the conquering force that would humble the continent’s old powers. Such arguments were common during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. By the time Alexander ascended to the Russian throne in 1801, however, the two powers around which they commonly revolved – Britain and France ...”

“... however, the medical profession has ‘forgotten’ what it once knew about its therapeutic powers. This is not hard to explain. In studies of traditional contraception and abortion practices, John Riddle has demonstrated how often knowledge of therapeutic agents formerly possessed by the folk memory and by medical practitioners has been ...”

“... be paid out of a large media organisation’s petty cash. An independent regulator with penal powers is a perfectly reasonable solution. Nevertheless, statutory regulation, although hardly a constitutional novelty, is not at present on the cards. What has emerged from the parliamentary crisis is something that is arguably misdescribed as statutory ...”

“... he coedited with René Hague, and forbade their publication during his own lifetime. Now, however, Thomas Dilworth has edited them as Wedding Poems. It’s a handsome-looking volume. There are photographs of Jones and the Grisewoods along with reproductions of some of Jones’s paintings of the time. There is also extensive critical and biographical commentary ...”

“... across a continent has a certain raffish hilarity to it and once produced a study called Dylan Thomas in America. This book is a sort of ‘Dylan Thomas in Africa’, with the difference that Breytenbach has written this one himself and cares about the continent he’s travelling through and getting drunk in. As he ...”

“... After a considerable pause he says: ‘I’m afraid that on this occasion I can only agree.’ Thomas Hobbes, political philosopher and inveterate royalist, has always had his admirers and loathers: from the moment his greatest work, Leviathan, was published in 1651, he has attracted reverence and spite, though rarely indifference, in equal measure. But ...”

“... trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of absurdity. On at least two ...”

“... is no longer there except as an intuition or perhaps a fiction: Shelley charms the star into what Thomas Hardy – a great admirer though a very different sort of poet – once called ‘existlessness’. And, to add to the sense of abstraction, this is a metaphor for a metaphor, since Shelley is likening the dwindling star to the soaring skylark, a bird ...”

“... in the same way as Saint-Just – if they think that the virtues as described by Aristotle or St Thomas are the necessary and sufficient materials of ethical self-understanding at the end of the 20th century. There is another way in which the demands of ethical disagreement as we more ordinarily meet it may seem to call on the theory of the ultimate ...”

“... end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s ...”

“... that trend cannot yet be judged, it is likely to gather strength from the important books in which Thomas Mayer and Alistair Fox examine the literature and politics of early Tudor England, especially of the reign of Henry VIII. Mayer’s concern is the literature of political theory. His study examines the ideas of ...”

“... and the great clock. You could exchange a note for ready coin, cash in your dividends and more. Thomas Rowlandson’s picture of the Rotunda from 1792 is filled with a crowd of jobbers, speculators, investors and matrons, as jolly and busy a scene as Ranelagh Gardens or the music room at Vauxhall, and like those other popular venues a magnet for foreign ...”

“... away entirely. Korzhakov’s reward was to be head of a new security service with vastly expanded powers. Almost overnight he became a politician with his own gang, whose tentacles stretched far into the economy. Mikhail Barsukov, his friend of 17 years, was later made head of the FSB. Oleg Soskovets, a vicious manager with lucrative connections in the ...”