“... order. ‘Everyone thinks Star Wars came out in 1977,’ Baillie said. ‘In the US it came out in May 1977, but in Britain it was released on 26 December 1977, when it was shown in two London cinemas. In January 1978, it was shown in the big Scottish cities. Ayr finally got it in April.’When Baillie turned sixteen, the manager offered him a summer job, then ...”

“... unconcerned about his lack of heirs. While he was devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him ...”

“... cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ‘May God preserve the City of London/And make this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation stone read. HMP Holloway, which was the largest women’s prison in Western Europe at its closure in 2016, at first held 120 men and 27 women, as well as a number of ...”

“... known as ‘rockets’, moving in a single direction with no prospect of a return journey.Museveni may have opened the door, but the constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group. Schedule 3 of the constitution included a list of ‘indigenous’ tribes. By this ...”

“... have (in general) chosen not to speculate about the substantial and important role that laughter may have played in the immediate and long-term reception of this literature.’ So this is a history of satire without the jokes. Sperrin derives his method of interpreting satirical texts from Quentin Skinner. He, like Skinner, aims to identify what a given ...”

“... Capital today is going to be vulnerable to criticism from a vast community of scholars. They may be praised for what they get right but they will certainly be taken to task for what they get wrong. It is a thankless business, not least because all translations eventually become obsolete. This is an insight that any historical materialist will ...”

“... no added promises’) on a fire. Words rear up and loom enormous – David Cameron, for example, may find this with his plan for ‘thrifty government’ – and fizz and collapse and make a nasty smell. It is, I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to save money. You ...”

“... the wind-farm gold-rush. Of course there are animals and birds, which look wild and free, but you may be sure they’ve been counted, ringed maybe, even radio-tagged, and all for good scientific reasons. And if we do find a Wild Place, we can prance about there knowing that no bears or wolves will appear over the bluff, because we disposed of the top ...”

“... undemocratic methods, Mélenchon’s adversaries charge him with authoritarian tendencies. Last May two centre-left journalists published a vitriolic pamphlet, La Meute (‘The Wolfpack’), which portrayed LFI as a one-man cult, where dissidents are quickly slandered and expelled. There is some truth to these accusations. LFI is a machine mostly designed ...”

“... skilful interlocution could enable others to be manipulated almost without their knowledge. Morus may be speaking for his creator when he recommends indirect methods of giving advice, ‘emotional appeals, hesitation and words broken by silences’, spurring the listener to ‘seek out the secret which he would not perhaps believe if he heard it openly ...”

“... It is still rumoured to be due to become a free settlement area. That means that ‘non-whites’ may under some new dispensation be able to purchase property here, which they do anyway in the hope that their stakes will eventually become legalised. Thus I can hardly get my car into the public street without eager buyers pitching me prices out of all ...”

“... although she tried with her tears to put out the fire that burned Zhang. Time and history may bring her into her own, though if she were to be translated, she would be the goddess, not of independence, but of consolation and compassion. As a writer, and a second-generation immigrant, Amy Tan wants to provide a fair hearing for the past, the present ...”

“... to see them again when she finished her book in 1988. Now things have changed, so perhaps she may revisit those lakes and forests after all. And if she does, she will find them less changed than the landscapes of Western Europe. The people, though, will be strangers speaking a strange language. There are not many Germans left in East Prussia (though ...”

“... pietà. Einstein is watching. He is not impressed’) and by even crankier footnotes. Her message may be cuddly, but the reader gets pushed around. She is always jumping out at him from the thickets of her strange imagination and eccentric prose and giving him frights – or else lectures. The lectures are annoying, but Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz is still an ...”

“... support the view that the court should remain exactly as it is: Byzantine and élitist though it may still seem, even after the reforms initiated by Lord Charteris when he was the Queen’s private secretary in the Sixties, Tomlinson disagrees, and then springs a surprise by waxing quite trumpet-tongued: The aura which surrounds Elizabeth’s person is not ...”