“... of clientage networks. From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely ...”

“... nine her little sister died and Olive, who had slept with the body until it was buried, lost her Christian faith. At 16 she was possibly engaged to, possibly seduced by, an insurance salesman who let her down: ‘the waking in the morning is hell,’ she wrote in her diary. At about the same time she was lent a copy of First Principles by Herbert ...”

“... will bring us to Sunt lacrimae rerum may be ‘In this fallen world we weep’, and in adducing Christian theology that greatly falsifies Virgil. Next, ‘A verb taking one object is monotransitive, a verb taking two objects is ditransitive.’ ‘Monotransitive’, ‘ditransitive’: consider yourself present at the birth; neither of those words is to be ...”

“... For example, in a metrical, thematically organised poem perhaps designed to mimic earlier English Christian poetry and song (George Herbert, say), the poet composes a prayer spoken by seabirds which, while still dropping the odd Joycean pun, seems sombrely portentous for no immediate reason: Pray for us when we fight the wind one to one; let not that ...”

“... ought probably to be signed and punctuated so that visitors don’t saunter away from a Christian Ethiopian mural (out of Africa) to find themselves in front of a Brazilian fish mask (into the Americas) used for warding off sickness during the dry season. The objects on show might then begin to look as good as the displays in the Pavillon des ...”

“... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...”

“... The history of England,’ Sir John Seeley declared in The Expansion of England (1883), ‘is not in England but in America and Asia.’ Like many aphorisms, this was at once consciously perverse and entirely apt. Seeley wrote as a fervid supporter of imperial federation, ‘Greater Britain’, but he was also taking issue, as in a preceding series of lectures delivered at Cambridge, with the introspection that characterised so much contemporary English historical writing ...”

“... call from a former student of mine. He wants to go to Lebanon. He reported from Sarajevo for the Christian Science Monitor but then thought better of all that, found a piece of land and a wife in Helena, Montana, sells hot dogs out of one of those corrugated steam wagons during the warm months, and writes during the winter. He’s half Lebanese and speaks ...”

“... for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. They dreamed of creating new Black Christian subjects who would accept their guidance and eventually become ‘like them’. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this ...”

“... John Reed,​ witness to the October Revolution and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, seems to have turned against the Bolshevik leaders just before he died in Moscow in 1920. His apostasy was not publicly known, however, and a decade later the American Communist Party, eager to exploit his fame, encouraged the formation of John Reed Clubs in New York and other cities ‘to bring closer all creative workers ...”

“... the giant vigilante organisation which centres on Pietersburg. Founded by a black businessman, John Magolego, Mapogo now has 35,000 paid up members, 10,000 of them white – it’s a booming business. It moves into an area, rounds up criminal suspects, beats the hell out of them, drags them behind vans on rocky roads or dangles them over crocodile-infested ...”

“... has to be presented, and indeed published in Latin. In an attempt to keep the tradition alive, John Paul II encouraged communities to put forward candidates for sanctification. The 482 new saints announced during his long pontificate amounted to almost a quarter of all those canonised in the previous five hundred years. At present some three thousand cases ...”

“... the Queen’s Gallery. Nasir-al-Din Haider had got clearance from the resident in Lucknow, Colonel John Low, and from the governor-general in Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, to dispatch the offerings: two elephants, two superb horses with jewelled harnesses, sundry necklaces, bracelets and Indian manuscripts galore, together with a bedstead studded with ...”

“... state in waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”