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“... printing-presses; the wounded are nursed back to health. Rabelais came to see joyful laughter as a means of comforting the sick in body and the sick in soul. In this way he reconciled his twin vocations of priest and doctor. Dr Rabelais, like Father Rabelais, comforts the afflicted. A Platonising bishop held that the surname Rabelais, by mystical Hebrew ...”

“... Kraus notes with much perception, ‘was selective and punitive, as it often is in families of means’.) As well as Karen – who at some point became Kathy – the Alexanders produced a younger girl, Wendy, who isn’t mentioned in Kraus’s list of sources. ‘An unimportant torment,’ Acker called her in Great Expectations. ‘My sister … is the ...”

“... have installed the entire radical menu at the centre of their humanities curriculum.’ This means, does it, that the works of Lenin and Mao Tse Tung are mandatory for all incoming students at Yale, Harvard, Chicago and hundreds of other colleges in America? Kimball might be able to find a handful of examples (Frantz Fanon being on the ‘Culture Ideas ...”

“... wanted tends to get lost in a professional ‘linguistic ambiguity’, to borrow a phrase used by David Ottaway in the Washington Post. Crocker writes that he wished to prepare for peace. The effect of what he did was to guarantee war. Large parts of Angola were ravaged in the period following Crocker’s success in making peace. Here was a dominant ...”

“... them. Peasants are beaten up. ‘Scorched earth’ methods are applied. Starving the guerrillas means starving villagers, who are herded into camps. Misery spreads further. A Makerere University academic has just been out west to collect his father. This man of 80 was farming near Kasese. Rebels passed by a few miles away. Other human beings rippled away ...”

“... life as in art. Our vogue for honesty in such matters, an honesty we now take wholly for granted, means that Wright as critic assumes that Hartley would have been all the better – and bigger – a writer had he early and fearlessly disclosed his case, and explored it fully and powerfully in his fiction. But this must be all wrong; and not only for a ...”

“... That calls the child with white ideas of swans    Nearer to that green lake Where every paradox means wonder. The Mallarméan subject, though more accessible than in ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, is every bit as immobilised; notice in the following lines Merrill’s ‘always’, the bell-jar dropped over the paralysed moment: Always ...”

“... in the 17th century, ‘the status of painting as the most prestigious and costly art was by no means universally accepted,’ he writes, noting that a set of jewel-encrusted liturgical objects in Cardinal Richelieu’s collection was appraised more highly than any of their owner’s paintings, which included Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with Saint ...”

“... like J.A. Hobson and soft socialists like R.H. Tawney. They may not all have willed the means proposed by Beveridge and Keynes (though an increasing number of them did) but most of them willed the end. They implemented the plans of their Labour masters not only dutifully but often with enthusiasm. It is most improbable, to put it no more ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”

“... light, but Leahy seems reluctant to pursue them. For him, the ‘intelligence war’ essentially means the infiltration of the IRA, not the abuse of intelligence by agents of the British state who colluded with loyalist paramilitaries in attacks on republicans. He doesn’t mention Gary Haggarty, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force and a paid police ...”

“... by Pope Sixtus IV’s nephew Raffaele Riario, a cardinal. As Martines shows, churches were by no means off-limits as locations for murder: the slaying of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral might have passed almost without notice in Italy. Indeed, the Pazzi chose as their signal to act the moment when Cardinal Riario elevated the Host: that is, the ...”

“... two enterprising brothers Francis and George Moult. In the early 1690s, Nehemiah Grew invented a means of deriving salt from the ‘spa waters bubbling up in the outskirts of London’, long known to have healing properties, and set up a factory for the production of what came to be known as ‘Epsom salt’. The Moults initially tried to buy the recipe from ...”

“... readily deployable,’ he said. ‘Our military must be able to identify targets by a variety of means, then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly … We must be able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy … with unmanned systems.’ Bush was taking his cue from a concept known as the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. The ...”

“... by suitably deferential courtiers wearing gold pins in the shape of bamboo – ‘Milasi’ means ‘bamboo’. Mdala believed that the British would not buy his plan unless it was backed up by stacks of historical evidence proving the legitimacy of the Milasi and their age-old right to rule. In fact the British were as opportunistic as the Yao and ...”