“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... states remained Catholic: to their rulers, notably Philip II of Spain, the English were anti-Christian and their queen a heretic. She spent the last 18 years of her reign fighting the Spanish, emptying the royal war chest and becoming increasingly dependent on the rich merchants who topped it up again. Driven by a sense of social utility as well as ...”

“... effects of different rates than on the exegesis of ancient texts. In a pamphlet from 1691, John Locke made an early, influential argument against efforts to hold down interest rates, claiming that this incentivised speculation, hurt prudent savers, and benefited only ‘bankers and scriveners’ who were ‘skilled in the arts of putting out ...”

“... Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones resembling shellfish: ‘It is strange that ...”

“... makes a very pretty girl, and when the sultana who has slipped him into the harem asks, ‘Christian, canst thou love?’ he bursts into tears – overwhelmed by thoughts of his last mistress. He is only able to regain his manhood and take advantage of his erotic opportunities later on. The poem is original, both in its manipulation of stereotypes and ...”

“... among the wretched.One way to survive was through internal exile. Thirty years after the war, Christian Schad, so forgotten that he had no reputation to blemish, would exhume himself to become a sucker for Oriental religions and an octogenarian flower child. Schad’s minutely rendered subjects were ...”

“... it with six thousand urns containing urine. Floating irresistibly back come recollections of John Nance Garner, Vice-President of the United States, describing his own job as ‘about as much use as a pitcher of warm piss’. John Nance Garner, where are you now that we need you? The bizarrerie that pleases me most is ...”

“... to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... and distinctive achievement. Pinget has been reasonably well served by his English publisher, John Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have ...”

“... at all costs,’ says James Harding. ‘He need not have worried, for Hobson was, and is, a Christian and a man of honour.’ Almost superstitiously, Agate entreated the Sunday Times to appoint Hobson as his successor and poor Alan Dent was left high and dry: ‘a brutal act of treachery’, says James Harding. By such strange chances, Hobson and Tynan ...”

“... housewife has for long been regarded by her, even if not by the law, as a family resource. It was John Hajnal in the 1960s who first alerted historians to the features of the marriage system prevailing for many centuries in Northern and Western Europe: late marriage and a sizeable proportion of permanent celibacy. The phrase ‘the Hajnal marriage ...”

“... not enough. Like the philosopher in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul, the difference between ‘John ate well’ (i.e. a lot) and ‘John ate well’ (i.e. in an elegant way), Castiglione’s courtiers know that adverbs can have many meanings. The courtier must not only do his job well (competently), he must also do it ...”

“... from Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Basque region, even Oklahoma (where revolutionary anarchism meets Christian eschatology), some of the mud, or Semtex, inevitably sticks. To guard against stereotyping and name-calling, accurate information about Islam has never been more urgently required in the west. What does ‘Islam’ actually say about terrorism, holy ...”

“... Wagner’s histrionic affectations, his popularity among German nationalists and his attraction to Christian and Buddhist doctrines of resignation and compassion. Such attitudes were, Nietzsche thought, a betrayal of the barbaric, Dionysian energies he discerned in Wagner’s music. He went on, as he put it, to ‘avenge myself on Wagner for my deceived ...”