“... bin Laden’s hideout under torture. ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of ...”

“... Liberal principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... at the hands of the Philistines, and applied to God for explanations and advice; but ‘the Lord answered him not.’ Saul therefore disguised himself in humble clothing and went off to consult a woman in Endor who had a reputation for wisdom. Reluctantly she set to work and called up the spirit of the prophet Samuel from beneath the ground; and Saul ...”

“... Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he couldn’t remember whether the entire board had been ...”

“... there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them lay the third, altogether healthier response: the sceptical, rational Anglicanism of the Great Tew Circle, of Clarendon and his ...”

“... clear, is disingenuous: Lee stayed – unlike many of the Clydesiders whose ties to the ILP leader James Maxton were as strong as hers – because she didn’t want to compromise her socialist principles. She believed in fighting for socialism against the enemy, which was sometimes within: ‘I wanted to take part in a political contest where the alignments ...”

“... assembled and unevenly printed volume has commanded which preoccupy the first volume of Anthony James West’s The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book, and they provide a very remarkable instance of the interplay between literature and the market, prompting all sorts of reflections on the curious relations between cultural capital and the real ...”

“... Mohawk Indians), Forrest played a noble American savage up against the English, notably the evil Lord Fitzarnold. Its sub-Ossianic script gives a vivid impression both of the bare-chested, full-bodied acting that was Forrest’s stock-in-trade and of some of the sentiments that would animate the Astor Place rioters: If ye love the silent spots where the ...”

“... review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management’ from a team chaired by James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield. Keeping tightly to its brief, Wilsdon et al’s report, published as The Metric Tide, is an extremely thorough and careful survey of the large literature on the topic. Where Muller’s ...”

“... is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the Confederacy. They included a gold star ...”

“... between Scottish identity and the left isn’t new. In 1924, the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton spoke of turning ‘the English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly ...”

“... Law and Astrology’. Jones is best remembered now for the Banqueting House in Whitehall for James VI and I, but more consequential in many ways was the layout of Covent Garden, the first square or ‘piazza’ to break with the higgledy-piggledy of medieval London and surrounded by the first terraced houses. On one side of it he built the church of St ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... continuing the old unequal struggle for national honour – appear a dream. In the 1706 Parliament Lord Belhaven made his famous over-the-top lament for ‘Mother Caledonia’, piling one bit of myth-history upon another in a surfeit of sentimental metaphors. Englishmen present failed to understand what he was going on about, but he was trying to express a ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”