“... every imaginable peer and rival over the past thirty years. The result was to put the followers of Jacob Zuma in power, initially with Kgalema Motlanthe as president. Ramaphosa remains not quite on the sidelines, an enigmatic and independent figure of considerable stature. The key moment in his biography was the great NUM strike of 1987. He had previously done ...”

“... most likely to sympathise with the new arrivals, whether Chartists like Ernest Jones or George Jacob Harney, ‘advanced’ publicists like G.H. Lewes or G.J. Holyoake, or even established writers like Carlyle or John Stuart Mill, had limited means and little patronage. But most new arrivals found that their heroism on ...”

“... forms of political power that went with it. The new pattern was first traced by Margaret Jacob in a monograph boldly entitled The Radical Enlightenment (1981). Her aim was to discredit the old picture of unworldly Philosophes who were ‘incapable of political action’, and replace it with a roguish gallery of ‘freemasons and ...”

“... novel first appeared, that the scholar Heinrich Kurz showed that its author must have been Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen – but identifying him didn’t get us very far. There’s not a lot of documentary evidence concerning him, and he systematically set out to mislead his readers. His description of the Battle of Wittstock in 1636, at which ...”

“... of virtue, clear conscience or good manners. We know that Bosch was acquainted with a man named Jacob Van Almaegien. Van Almaegien was a Jew who converted to Christianity perhaps more out of convenience than conviction, since, according to the Bosch scholar Wilhelm Fraenger, after being admitted to the Brotherhood of Our Blessed Lady he returned to ...”

“... Society and in due course he got his ‘first’, securing with it a research scholarship of £100 p.a. (not at all bad pay at that time) to continue with research – upon a problem in physical chemistry, unfortunately, which did not greatly appeal to him, hankering as he was after the chemistry of substances found in living matter. So Alex felt that he ought ...”

“... Essays, subtitled Serious Pursuits, contains several spin-offs from the task that Sir Ian Jacob, then Director-General, first invited him to take on in 1958 – a history of the BBC which became his monumental History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. He traces the emergence of mass entertainment, with broadcasting arriving almost last on the ...”

“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”

“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”

“... this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by investigating the social origins of some three thousand saints. He concluded that ‘the ...”

“... three hundred years ago. After studying London hospital records covering nearly a century, Dr John Arbuthnot concluded that, in every year, more boys had been born than girls; each year on record was a ‘male year’. Why was this? We can imagine a mad style of reductionist explanation, accessible only to a prurient deity: describe the physical and ...”

“... times’ (a translation of Cennino Cennini’s 14th-century Libro dell’arte) as follows: ‘P.vi (Preface). First and last paragraphs. P.143. First three lines. P.183. Third, fourth and fifth lines.’ Break off to hum a few music-hall hits: ‘Par’ ought to know’; ‘When there ...”

“... religious practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and re-excavated some more Old Testament tombs ...”

“... and social reform. The New School for Social Research opened in 1919: Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey were on the staff; Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford were regular visitors. Located in Greenwich Village, the New School became a centre for music, dance and the visual arts, the place to teach or attend lectures. Much of the credit for putting it on the ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”