“... as faqirs, and their knowledge of the innermost secrets of the Yazidis’ faith, gives them the power to foretell the future. What the sheikh foresaw was bleak: ‘We revere seven angels who carry out in this world the will of the noble lord. And his will now is to destroy us. If God does not have mercy, we are finished. And if we are not helped, then God ...”

“... who weren’t writing serial music: American tonalists such as Copland, Virgil Thomson and Henry Cowell; or the radical wing represented by John Cage and Morton Feldman, which rejected both tendencies. He would encounter them when he went to New York to study at Juilliard in 1956, but again in the extra-curricular context of downtown alternative ...”

“... in the secret closet of the self.Characters caught up in exactly the same story form the basis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The old man leaves the money to his niece so that she can ‘meet the requirements of her imagination’. The phrase belongs to the old man’s son, Ralph, and so does the idea of the legacy. Just before he himself dies ...”

“... Christian IV of Denmark’s state visit to England in 1606 was the first by a foreign ruler since Henry VIII’s entertainment of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1522. James II’s journey through Ireland in 1689 was the first time an English monarch had visited since Richard II in 1399. The marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector ...”

“... In​ 1975, as Henry Kissinger was trying to negotiate a settlement to the Arab-Israeli War, he warned the Israeli government that a breakdown in the talks would bring catastrophe to the Middle East. The Israeli minister of foreign affairs, Yigan Allon, doubted this and convened a group of experts to investigate. It was led by Zvi Lanir, a political scientist and official at the Israeli foreign ministry, and Daniel Kahneman, who taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and had spent the war, along with his colleague Amos Tversky, in a unit of psychologists embedded with the IDF and tasked with studying troop morale in the Sinai ...”

“... Puritan New England’s trust in ‘love, and their Bible, with their absolute certainty in the power of the Lord and the protection of their guns’.Act of Oblivion is more than just a page-turner, however. Harris’s retelling takes in several thorny matters, not least of which is the volatility inherent in post-conflict politics. The novel’s title ...”

“... BBC Third Programme in 1950 for a professional performance by the Schola Polyphonica directed by Henry Washington and was sung at the funeral of the composer Manuel de Falla in Cádiz Cathedral in January 1947. Something of the atmosphere that had by now attached itself to the work was expressed by Juan María Thomas, who conducted it on that occasion: ‘We ...”

“... laid on a trestle. The little picture had an openness of heart quite foreign to the pursuit of power. Unlike Nomzamo’s, which might as well have been the emblem of her football club, it said nothing obvious or apposite about the state of the nation. If anything, the Sunday-morning reader scrutinising it for some helpful clue would have gone away with the ...”

“... rights enforceable by law. For all their imperfections, the courts set limits on executive power and arbitrary rule. The defence of judicial independence, the campaign for trial by jury and the appeal to the courts for protection of individual rights provided both a language and a site of politics in the absence of representative institutions. Neal ...”

“... he pours scorn on it – too stridently, he now confesses – in an essay on Orwell and Henry Miller called ‘Outside the Whale’. Arnold visits the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse and contemplates it through the lens of his famous melancholy. The new world powerless to be born was that foreseen in the heroic but failed efforts of the Romantic ...”

“... in Whitehall, starting with their first member the Earl of Cavan – described by the waspish Henry Wilson as ‘ignorant, pompous, vain and narrow, but a nice man and a fine fighting soldier’. But Cavan’s colleagues were the formidable Beatty for the Navy and the even more formidable Trenchard for the RAF, and the conflict between these two mastodons ...”

“... period. In the great expansion of mercantilist empire, emigrants were agents of the metropolitan power. As such, they were the advance guard ferreting out important raw materials and markets for London. But after the break (or Fall), emigrants were, as we know from British travellers’ accounts, deemed deficient in precisely those qualities cited by ...”

“... to want wholeheartedly, and he becomes one of those characters so frequent in Wharton and Henry James, the man to whom nothing has happened, who has missed his whole life, as if it was an opera he was too late for. Day-Lewis brings to this part a wonderful, tired, feeble charm, creates a perfect sense of how attractive and hopeless Newland is: subtle ...”

“... there is evidence of one female entrepreneur, Mabel of Bury St Edmunds, who worked on orders from Henry III. There is also evidence of nuns doing ‘silkwork’ as the labour input required by the Rule, and some of this was not for ecclesiastical purposes. The motifs and the shaping of religious fabrics were highly suitable for manufacture by a group of ...”

“... of past women is not necessarily to learn much about the operation or the balance of past sexual power. A major surprise of Fraser’s book is her decision to draw so little on the imaginative literature of the time. Simple and obvious questions ask themselves. Why is there so large a gap between the depressed condition of women apparently prescribed by ...”