“... irrelevant. During a visit to Richmond soon after the end of the Civil War, the Scottish minister David Macrae met a slave who complained of past mistreatment while acknowledging that he had never been whipped. ‘How were you cruelly treated then?’ Macrae asked. ‘I was cruelly treated,’ the freedman answered, ‘because I was ...”

“... figurine from around 1680, created by the Nuremberg sculptor Stephan Zick, has articulated arms held in place at the shoulder by pegs. One hand lies alongside the body, while the other secures the abdomen in place. The arm can be lifted so that it rests on the forehead and the belly removed to reveal internal organs and a womb complete with an ivory ...”

“... that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say that this was ground that the Lord still held. What he looked out upon was the sign of a broken covenant. The place was forsaken and his own.In his introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and O’Connor the ...”

“... had a reputation for enjoying popular culture. He once made a TV programme celebrating the work of David Byrne of Talking Heads. In 2008, it was reported in the nationals that he’d set an exam question asking for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ to be compared with a ballad by Walter Raleigh. Here, in a lecture on comic timing, Griffiths reads a ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... later, we trudged through the rain and the cold to the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held. The guide, well-informed and energetic, told us that some industrial magnates who thought they could control Hitler had attended the conference, at which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed. Whether or not the regime in the US is best ...”

“... campaigner William Morgan. Soon, America had its own Anti-Masonic political party, which held the very first Presidential nominating convention, when, in November 1831, it selected William Wirt of Maryland. Wirt won only one state as a third-party candidate against the victorious Democrat (and Mason) Andrew Jackson and the National ...”

“... when the other ‘techs’ quoted on NASDAQ took a terrible beating, Amazon.com stock (AMZN) held firm. Investors have faith in it. On the other hand, and rather worryingly, Amazon.com is still not in profit. Nor is it clear when it will be. Bezos used to hazard late 1998. But asked by CNN a few weeks ago, he testily refused to make a ...”

“... work for the Red Cross or the United Nations often are denied their right of access, harassed and held hostage, injured and killed ... International humanitarian actors suffer indignities differing only in degree from those experienced by distressed civilian populations.’ This is nonsense. The idea that UN workers, eating imported food and wearing flak ...”

“... Brixton Riots of 1981. The first International Conference on the History of Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted ...”

“... of Victorian Gothic larded with Islamic motifs, resoundingly to flight.’ Architecture, as David Cannadine has pointed out, played a part in the consolidation of the Indian Empire, and the Viceroy’s House, ‘a ducal domain-cum-country house-cum-princely palace’, complete with six thousand servants, was a metaphor for the social hierarchy and ...”

“... continued their South African practice of convening regular ‘moots’, which were frequently held at Cliveden, a palatial house near Windsor. This book deals with the core members of the set: Lothian, judged by another member to be ‘airy and viewy’, a Roman Catholic who converted to Christian Science, became private secretary to Lloyd George in the ...”

“... was crucial to the Government’s case to demonstrate that the British Convention which had been held in Edinburgh in October 1793 as part of a campaign to obtain universal manhood suffrage constituted an overt act of treason: that Convention delegates planned to overthrow the Government and by extension intended the destruction of the King. This argument ...”

“... labourers and workmen’: on the contrary, in the second edition of the Wealth of Nations, Smith held that ‘high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages.’ Above all, he hoped that a universal system of public instruction in science and philosophy would enable working people to transcend the narrow perspectives and ...”

“... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...”