“... as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the ...”

“... There was a press conference on the 19th and the public picked up the 1918 connection on the 20th. David Sencer, Director of the Center for Disease Control at Atlanta, Georgia, prepared a memorandum called ‘Swine Influenza: action’. It went via the secretaries of health, education and welfare to President Ford. On 24 March a ‘Blue Riband Panel’ of ...”

“... from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by Christopher Middleton, and three by Lee Harwood. The publishing provenance of an outsider poet like Harwood can tell you a lot about his work: Fulcrum, Oasis Books, Pig Press, Galloping ...”

“... treatment and the public discourse has already been charted by Andrew Scull, Michel Foucault and David Rothman. Roger Smith’s contribution is to show that the legal conceptions of mens rea and free will provided the basis for resisting medical claims to hegemoney, not only within the courtroom, but in ‘public opinion’ at large. The ...”

“... to the Rock the Vote campaign (the rock’n’roll initiative to re-enfranchise youth), which means 400,000 more 18-to-25-year-olds voting this year than in 1992. An apolitical organisation, but helped along by the rocking Noel and Damon, who have, well, given the nod already, it’s no less partisan in practice than Billy Bragg’s Red Wedge. Rodol’s ...”

“... time the lonely outsider commemorated by Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and (more cannily) Wordsworth. David Fairer maintains that their Wertherisation of Chatterton’s alleged suicide concentrated the Romantic poets’ minds on their own social isolation, on the necessary dissidence of the poet’s task and the short time reserved for its performance. Chatterton ...”

“... time, nothing much seemed to be happening, but then in January the lead counsel to the inquiry, David Barr KC, who has been plodding through the evidence since 2015, made a submission about the role of SDS’s senior management. He focused on a simple question: what was the justification, as understood at the outset, for the infiltration by undercover ...”

“... people saw in the ‘Yes’ campaign. Instead, they were trying to get things back to normal.When David Cameron emerged from 10 Downing Street after the referendum to announce a policy of ‘English votes for English laws’, the scales tipped. One of Bennie et al’s interviewees recalls that Cameron ‘thought Scotland was back in its box. We remembered ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”