“... of the politics of the Ottoman house.Suleyman came to the throne in 1520, when he was 26. That may sound young, but he was in good company: Francis I, king of France since 1515, had been born in the same year as him, and Henry VIII (crowned in 1509) was three years older. Charles V was installed as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 at the age of ...”

“... profession of faith,’ he stated, ‘but I cannot discount at least the possibility that he may in later years suffer some diminution in his convictions.’ The boy was transfused; but when he turned 18 he exercised his right to refuse further transfusions, and died. In McEwan’s version, the boy, Adam Henry, is ‘a very strange and beautiful young ...”

“... gross negligence manslaughter, felt these parents also deserved sympathy and understanding. Marten may have loved the wrong man, and expressed maternal devotion in socially unacceptable ways; the couple may have failed their children at times and tried to escape a system they saw as pernicious and cruel. But did they deserve ...”

“... believed they could sell Gorbachev the idea that he needed to have his way cleared, and that he may well have encouraged this view before the coup took place, only to realise after the event that his acquiescence would mean he was their political prisoner. Yeltsin has some sharp things to say about the August coup itself. His acute descriptions of the ...”

“... who had abolished the corset and introduced trousers for women) and Diaghilev were close. In May 1912, Fry held an exhibition of British Modernists – Vanessa Bell, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, himself, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and some others – at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, which was located on the ground floor of ...”

“... that Léon Delbecque was sent to Algiers, there to become the main mover behind the 13 May army coup. Not only that: Foccart stage-managed Operation Resurrection – the planned paratroop landing on Paris – as a way of coercing Fourth Republic politicians to vote de Gaulle back into power. Foccart was, in fact, the perfect homme de main. When ...”

“... its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, committed to the armed struggle. But whatever hopes the ANC may have entertained of building a patron-client relationship with Buthelezi could not have lasted long: it soon became clear that he was building a wholly independent power base. The Soweto uprising of 1976 caught the ANC badly off-guard. The events owed nothing ...”

“... greatest work with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of emotion. It is this delicacy that may finally convince us that we are in the presence of that rarest of achievements in art, the re-invention of sublimity. Bruno Walter once said to Thomas Mann, as they were walking home after Walter had conducted a performance of Tristan and Isolde: ‘That ...”

“... of the United States. Saddam Hussein should have been there. (Hampered by travel restrictions, he may have sent flowers.) All the other godfathers had seen the King as expendable at one time or another. The Saudis subverted his regime and stole his family title, Custodian of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Netanyahu’s people proposed overthrowing him ...”

“... If we wait, we cannot build. If we break the law, we can. We decided to break the law. The regime may have boasted about the virtues of collectivised agriculture, but we have known for a long time that it was really the private plots that fed the country. Thanks to Fitzpatrick, we now know that ‘leaks’ in the urban economy ...”

“... the Northern Hemisphere would benefit greatly from a thin Selected; but even his slackest failures may be the sorts of thing a poet has to risk to become as original a writer as he now is. He also writes strongly felt verse-essays, expository or polemical: their titles name their genre and topic (‘Second Essay on Interest: The Emu’). These poems often rely ...”

“... than of intellectualist pondering. Truth cannot be abstracted from an action so that its validity may be tested by other actions in the form of logic or science. ‘The truth of an idea,’ he says in Pragmatism, is not a stagnant property inherent to it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a ...”

“... Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English history,’ Dr Alderman writes, ‘the spectre was raised, and the possibility (however remote or ...”

“... one type of beauty which he appreciated all too well. The bachelor don is today extinct. There may still be bachelors among the fellows of colleges, but the society in which they played such a distinctive role has vanished. The Royal Commission of 1882 had recommended that dons, like professors and heads of houses, should be free to marry, and amid lively ...”

“... his main achievements – his remarks on the links between Protestantism and capitalism – may be wrong-headed, they have been a great stimulating force. But there were weaknesses in the later Weber: above all, a willingness to spill out words, knowing, German-fashion, that they would be received as messages from on high. It was also a weakness of ...”