“... effects even for Jews than, for example, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand or of Henry IV of France. Jewish historians must always remind themselves that they are specialised workers in the larger historical field which is concerned with what is sometimes referred to as the ‘host community’. The two books before us, recent publications of ...”

“... history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account of Henry’s reign abandons factual accuracy. Behind it there lies instead the old literary model ...”

“... on returning from exile he had explicitly sought sanctuary there. Only the public penance of Henry II and an exceptionally rapid canonisation could satisfy burgeoning devotion to the new martyr. But Becket’s prominence was unusual, since most sanctuary seekers were poor and desperate. As a legal practice, sanctuary relied on what Allen calls ‘divine ...”

“... translated, contextualised and published with a thoughtful and informative introduction by Henry Louis Gates and Andrew Curran, who discuss the city, the academy and ways of reading the range of bizarre explanations offered for black skin and hair. The essay writers included biblical scholars, gentlemen naturalists and theorists who held that skin ...”

“... within lay religion may sometimes look like special pleading. An old man of Cartmel, told in James I’s reign of Jesus Christ and His saving power, remarked: ‘I think I heard of that man ... once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.’ For most historians the story reveals an abyss of ...”

“... and imagination but because for much of his life he was furiously overworked as house manager for Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. Aside from Dracula, Stoker wrote nothing of note, and plenty that was excruciating. ‘There is a semi-heroic, Everyman quality about his intense command of the mediocre,’ the critic Ludovic Flow wrote, ‘as if the ...”

“... professor and the ayatollah are oddly at one. Lewis’s view has been challenged by (among others) James Piscatori, in his book Islam in a World of Nation-States, which argued persuasively that the modern idea of nationalism has been fully absorbed into the mainstream of Muslim thinking, from Morocco to Indonesia. Lewis is implicitly challenged in a number of ...”

“... The figures who were at the helm of the AIA – Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe, James Holland, James Fitton, James Boswell, Betty Rea, Nan Youngman, Clive Branson – are largely forgotten. The first two may be known to aficionados of design and of children’s books and ...”

“... actual motion, and done with such light airy facility. Oh! it delighted me when I saw it,’ James Northcote, a pupil of Reynolds, said, having watched Gainsborough at work on Queen Charlotte’s drapery.But these accounts of his later practice are irrelevant to the pictures one turns to first: those crisp, bright, freshly coloured group portraits in ...”

“... had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He reported that Austen told her family: ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell about two years.’Most readers of Austen’s fiction feel instinctively that her ...”

“... our knowledge of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court entertainments and dramatic censorship; Malone who first trawled systematically through the parish and corporation records of Stratford for the ...”

“... settled on the tone he was to take throughout his life. He stayed on to study with William James, Josiah Royce and others in that golden age of American academic philosophising. He distinguished himself in his studies – and, in his attitude towards them, from his teachers. He began to sound a characteristic note of joyous disdain for ordinary ...”

“... was born, according to her burial record, in 1822 or 1823, and christened on 4 April 1824 at St James, Paddington. Her baptismal record states that her parents were ‘William and Lætitia Stuart’, that they lived in Paddington (in the company of a carpenter, gardener and wheelwright, whose children’s baptisms are recorded alongside Ella’s) and that ...”

“... meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends ...”

“... the past forty years, are the major recruiting ground for international terrorism,’ and ‘Dr Henry Kissinger and many other experts have been right to point out in recent days that in the list of governments supporting international terrorism, Gaddafi comes pretty low down.’ If he disappeared from the scene, ‘terrorism, as a result of the activities ...”