“... lacking duty, Neither regarding that she is my child Nor fearing me as if I were her father. And may I say to thee, this pride of hers Upon advice hath drawn my love from her, And where I thought the remnant of mine age Should have been cherished by her child-like duty, I … turn her out to who will take her in. Then let her beauty be her wedding dower ...”

“... over six pages of ‘A-14’. There are also passages from Heart of Darkness and allusions to the May 1963 marches in Birmingham, Alabama and the September bombing of a Baptist church in which four black children were killed. Then there are the semantically dense clusters, like this one from ‘A-23’: Cue in new – old quantities – ‘Don’t Bother ...”

“... the principle of damage-limitation in the Geneva Conventions. Law 28 for instance: ‘No player may wear projecting nails or iron plates on the heels or soles of his shoes or boots.’ Others are faintly ludicrous. Law 21 is a typical public-school injunction, stamped with recondite authority: ‘Two big-side balls must always be in the Close during a match ...”

“... of the term East Jerusalem was one of them. The restrictions aren’t confined to geography. On 20 May 2006, Israel’s most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported ‘another targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the firing of Qassams’ (up to 376 people have died in targeted assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were ...”

“... forget,’ Melcher once told a reporter, ‘she is always the victim.’ Doris’s husband may have engineered every aspect of her celebrity, keeping her on a production treadmill, churning out movies at a startling rate, but he was also her protector, keeping her separate from the business of crafting her persona. ‘I wasn’t too sure about being in ...”

“... the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’. But Ora Horn Prouser says that the command ‘may simply appear to be about holiness’ when, actually, it defines the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and unreadiness, therefore, are ...”

“... of a criminal gang that was supposedly dealing in stolen church artefacts. But Father Mario may also have owed his freedom to the intervention of Jean Arnault, the head of MINUGUA, the UN mission in Guatemala. Two days after the priest was formally charged in October 1998, Arnault gave a press conference. ‘We know that groups exist,’ he ...”

“... conception of the authority of science, as well as a refusal to deny the reality of the mental. He may have been a systematic philosopher, but that does not mean that certain ideas could not be detached from his system. One thing which might be worth detaching is the scientia mensura itself. This idea receives remarkably little discussion in the essays in this ...”

“... Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his rebellious heir to Bayonne, where he forced them both to abdicate in favour of his own brother Joseph. He counted on his troops already in the Peninsula to enforce the transition, but faced insurrections in numerous ...”

“... she said in her final statement, ‘and that I reserve the right to cultivate any relations that may please me. The war is not sufficient reason to stop me from being a cosmopolitan.’ After her execution, her body went unclaimed by relatives and was dissected by medical students. Her head went to the Museum of Anatomy in Paris, where it joined a collection ...”

“... from joining the fast track to economic modernisation? Bayly believes that in the long term Asians may have been the victims of the ‘relative peace’ their continent had enjoyed during the 17th century. While the stable empires of 17th-century Asia had nurtured pockets of ‘industrious revolution’, the ferocious wars fought by the comparatively ...”

“... green, think again: he’s usually ‘a dull slate grey’. ‘Godzilla was not, as some people may still believe, borrowed wholesale from Japanese folklore.’ Intermediate-level fans also feel the lash: there’s no evidence, for instance, that the Toho back lot once harboured a fat props man who lent the monster his nickname in 1954. And if you’ve ...”

“... a massacre in Africa. He returns to urban disarray, the tawdry backdrop to life in London. It was May, and already more summer than spring. The leaves on the roadside trees were dustless, vivid, part luminous. Until late into the evening cars crawled in the traffic, windows down, music thudding. Children out of school squabbled in the street, kicked balls ...”

“... into destitution, but our better-off would be, in cash terms at least, better-off. Pollyannas may think that this middle figure shows we are steering an appropriately mid-Atlantic course between the horrors of unfettered capitalism and Eurosclerosis. Perhaps. But I think the state of Britain, seven years into a ‘progressive’ government, is a bit more ...”

“... most illustrious prostitute, that she has a habit of lifting her shirt whenever she thinks a man may be interested in her, that she won a large settlement after a car accident but blew it all on drink and drug binges, which have in turn made her prone to psychotic episodes. Her room-mates, both older Hispanic men, are named – somewhat improbably – Mingo ...”