“... heart. In this case, it transpired, locals considered the evidence to be overwhelming, and all the more sinister and compelling for being invisible. At least one of the women died as a result of the ordeal; two others were banished. ‘Maybe this will be the last case of its kind,’ Deputy Commander Nili said, knowing this to be unlikely. Around 150 suspected ...”

“... by a coven of witches evidently visiting from Dunsinane), the cast of Hamlet were compelled once more to enact the fatal events which had convened this feast in Death’s eternal cell, in a mode that combined the nakedly and convincingly traumatic with a Goth-influenced rock soundtrack and some exquisite passages of wordless dance. In a ...”

“... of person to person, idea to utterance, mind to hand to paper – a faith made so much more impossible in the new era of Babel in which Singer was learning English. In his own writing, Foer has shown both an unusual faith in the power of written communication and a true believer’s willingness to test its limits. Although most readers became ...”

“... what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas Beddoes, ‘with any degree of exactness, to our inward feelings.’ Miss Martineau’s tender womb certainly entered the public domain, and she was no slouch at what Post-Modernists now call ‘writing the body’; but for all that, the historian is left ...”

“... surprised by the durability of his fame. He has been ranked among the very greatest of artists for more than five centuries, ever since he published, in 1498, at the age of 27, an edition of the Book of Revelations illustrated with 15 full-page woodcuts: unprecedented displays of technical virtuosity in this most intractable medium. ‘The Monstrous Sow of ...”

“... only by faith. But he equally repudiates the natural theology of neo-Thomism and indeed of St Thomas himself: ‘There is ... no two-level reality, consisting of a “natural” substructure of truths of pure reason and a “supernatural” superstructure of truths of pure faith.’ The task which Dr Küng sets himself is that of showing that the exercise ...”

“... Sioux always get to be on television. They get everything.’ Alexie’s characters know more about basketball and Hollywood, heavy metal and Hank Williams, than they do about buffalo. His young men might believe that they’re supposed to be warriors, but most of them know that’s a hopeless fantasy. Instead they are unemployed, or in prison, or ...”

“... made war.’ But how (and when and where) did war make the state? This question is at the heart of Thomas Ertman’s challenging study. Historians and sociologists have treated Prussia as the paradigm of war-oriented state-building in Europe; yet the Prussian experience was far from typical. Elsewhere, in the Early Modern era, the planning, financing and ...”

“... what was wrong with the old approach a new generation of commentators hopes to devise a more plausible and durable theory of lateness. What was wrong with the old theory can be traced back to J.J. Winckelmann, the 18th-century father of art history. Taking the history of Greece as his model, he put into circulation what one contributor to the Getty ...”

“... historians of later medieval England have, perhaps belatedly, begun to weigh their significance more attentively, seeking in them some sense of the accepted principles that constrained, if they did not determine, the pursuit of political life. It is within this context of political mentalities that Jonathan Hughes situates his study of the Duke of York’s ...”

“... You’d have thought that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive.Martin Amis, MoneyWell, they keep trying. Look here upon this picture, and on this. Both are unsigned 17th-century portraits, one depicting a man, the other a child. The man is an affable-looking chap, reminiscent of Phil Hopkins, a percussionist ...”

“... head always wishes that someone was making the counter-argument against a thriving car industry. Thomas Friedman recently said in the New York Times that the Detroit bail-out was ‘the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay’. There’s something in that; when I ...”

“... Henry’s reign, surfacing for example in the warning from the mayor of London, the redoubtable Thomas fitzThomas, at St Paul’s in 1265: ‘As long as you wish to be a good king and lord to us, we will be faithful and devoted to you.’After this unpromising start – a civil war in which the barons only narrowly opted in the end for the child Henry ...”

“... political terror, social cleansing, genocide, slave labour, medical experimentation and more. This is the first book to try to give a comprehensive account of the camp system in its entirety. Wachsmann disentangles the history of the KL from the related but distinct history with which it is often conflated: that of the Holocaust, and ...”

“... What​ is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class ...”