“... egalitarianism, colour blindness and individual liberty against the forces of oppression that long held blacks in a subservient status. Americans remember the struggle for racial equality as a morality play, pitting nonviolence against racist violence, love against hatred. It is a Christian story of redemptive suffering and even martyrdom, as activists ...”

“... his microminiatures. His first exhibition, sponsored by the Armenian Allied Arts Association, was held in 1986 and featured ‘eye-of-a-needle portraits’ of Napoleon, a Spanish dancer, Donald Duck and several other Disney characters, as well as a grain of rice inscribed with verse. The show was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall ...”

“... The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a display of the many different coins issued by individual German states shows. The Great Nef, a mechanical galleon made around 1585 by Hans Schlottheim, was intended to symbolise the empire’s harmonious ...”

“... to save them from starving.’ But the story did not end there. When in 2002 the home secretary, David Blunkett, slipped into a bill a provision expressly empowering such action, the Human Rights Act required him to include a safety-net provision that the use of the power was not to result in inhuman or degrading treatment of the destitute. Mr Justice ...”

“... in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair ...”

“... prophetic image Carlyle is evoking a relatively widespread evolutionary theory of the time; this held that the entire race of liberated black Americans would inevitably be wiped out in their struggle for survival with their white competitors. It was only their divinely appointed servitude that had enabled them to prosper and multiply as they had on the ...”

“... Rogers, Ingrid Bergman and Mary Pickford joined a committee to welcome her to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick sponsored an evening in her honour during which the Los Angeles Philharmonic played ‘The Madame Chiang Kai-shek March’. (As she was travelling west, the inhabitants of one small town lined up to see her when her train stopped to take on ...”

“... of the latter, as you know, and he thought it was very good but he finally decided to acquire from David Godine, the American publisher who holds the copyright to both current translations, their version of The Prospector … Ravi knows Sue Berger (who worked for Godine) well, because they used to be colleagues in London when both were working for Penguin and ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”

“... fairness it should be remembered that free market theory at the time – unlike today’s – held that capitalism would eventually produce economic and social equality. John Stuart Mill, one of its champions, declared that if it didn’t, he would become a socialist.) Macaulay’s History of England now reads obviously as a document of its time; which is ...”

“... Legatine Court and confounded Henry in a magnificent coup de théâtre. The court itself, held publicly at Blackfriars, was sensational enough, with the king and queen of England summoned before two cardinals to have their grievances aired in public. Henry, all anguished innocence, paraded his lacerated conscience, only to be struck dumb when ...”

“... had their metadata, including origin and destination numbers, logged by the NSA and continue to be held for government review by the phone companies. There are also the lists that the US government keeps of people whom it deems to be worth watching. The best known is the No Fly List, which contains tens of thousands of names. The more obscure Terrorist ...”

“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”

“... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...”

“... the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April. The Turkish war was both unsuccessful and unpopular. In the view of the new Imperial ...”