“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... of his painting and his lack of interest in appealing to our ‘tenderer feelings’ was not held against him and, once Fry had discovered Seurat and embraced formalism, these became emphatically positive qualities. Only the quietest of human exchanges are rendered memorably by Piero, and this has suited those artists who have learned from him. Semiramis ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ‘La Bolaing’. So far so good. But how it was that Anne held out for marriage rather than a more conventional relationship, and why Henry allowed her to dictate her terms when his original intention was to make her his mistress, are other questions altogether. Henry was already trying to free himself from the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... something more akin to a gut instinct’. Gut instinct, in this case, was the widespread and long-held conviction that black people were criminals. Remember Lana Barnett: ‘We know these people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell.’ Blakeslee mentions other cases, tangential to the drug busts, that reveal Tulians’ willingness to convict and ...”

“... at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials summoned the newly appointed British ...”

“... outstrip the mind’s capacity to hold anything in its proper place. At a Binary Defiance workshop held at the 2015 True Colours Conference, an annual event for gay and transgender youth at the University of Connecticut, the following were listed on the blackboard: non-binary, gender queer, bigender, trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third ...”

“... the sea has won for ever. The land must be defended, the land must be fortified, the line must be held. Or you give in and surrender permanently to the sea. But in nature, there’s no such border. Climate change apart, the line between land and sea moves minute by minute with the tides, the waves, the wind and the multi-year cycles of the moon’s ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... the dawn of the 21st century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values … held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate’.1 The reputation, he assures us, is ‘well-earned’. The same vision grips the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark ...”