“... of The Irish Witch (1973), for example, one of a dozen novels featuring the Napoleonic-era spy Roger Brook, is disrupted by obsessive ruminations on the use of pubic hair in love-spells and resolved by the physical manifestation of a Native American animal totem (‘The last that Roger saw of them through the mist they ...”

“... and its inhabitants have frequently been massacred. Round about 1000 BC, the city was captured by King David. Assuming that he existed – and there is no archaeological or other evidence for him, or for Solomon, Moses or Joshua, outside the Bible, the relevant books of which were written hundreds of years after the events they purport to describe – David ...”

“... remain interlocked, involved in geopolitical struggles for coltan, diamonds, oil and timber. When Roger Casement visited a coffee plantation in northern Angola in 1902, he described the situation there in a report to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He found that contract workers known in Portuguese Angola as serviçais were being brought in from the ...”

“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...”

“... a thousand close-set pages of the modern edition for the three years 1845-8 alone, according to Roger Pierrot, whose sadly pedantic new biography is good for dry facts such as this, if not for very much else. Balzac wanted it to be thought that the Comédie Humaine began as a dream for the good reason that, had it in fact done so, the turning of the dream ...”

“... Le Goff calls ‘an intellectual technocracy’. In the 13th century, the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon explained to the Pope that his astrological and technical skills promised big military and political pay-offs: ‘the Church should consider the employment of these inventions against unbelievers and rebels to spare Christian blood.’ Improvements in ...”

“... C.R.W. Nevinson fancied the life of a bohemian and attention-grabber. His idol was Augustus John, king of the Café Royal, and, in 1908, he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and ...”

“... investigators during the last three decades of the 19th century, the period dealt with in Roger Luckhurst’s study. Photography was of inestimable importance in disseminating the performance of the mediums, as well as offering a deep metaphor for the relation between external matter and immaterial thought. While the interplay between psychology and ...”

“... orientation. In this context, Malise Ruthven’s journey – which begins at the tomb of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven ...”

“... Puritans like Cartwright and Perkins (though Dr Kendall would not call him a Puritan), later King James I, all agreed on the essentials of theology. This orthodoxy was challenged by Laudians in the 1630s, by sectaries in the Forties and Fifties. By the end of the century, Calvinism was no longer the intellectual force it had been. It was not stressed by ...”

“... In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull ...”

“... have come to doubt conventional notions of causality altogether. In an influential book, Roger Chartier went so far as to urge historians to abandon the traditional search for the causes of the Revolution, and to consider Michel Foucault’s ‘systematic deployment of the notion of discontinuity’. The philosophy of history has certainly changed ...”

“... Turkish servant and his pet dog Loulou) were brought back in a triumphant military procession; the King ordered a medal to be coined, poems were written, and Potocki was the hero of the hour. As the result of three successive partitions, the last in 1795, Poland was more or less to disappear from the map. Accordingly, and not too surprisingly, Potocki took a ...”

“... and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree way. Three years later followed The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since ...”

“... course by producers of the plays who begin Macbeth with the witches engaged in ballroom dancing. Roger Kimball’s recent writings, including Tenured Radicals, give details of similar, or perhaps one should say more advanced, Shakespearian attitudes in American critical thinking, exemplified in papers about ‘Contemporary Indian Uses of Shakespeare’, or ...”