“... greatest tyrant that ever was in England … I wot not what Nero, what Dionysius, or what Mahomet may be compared unto him.’ Walker’s subject is the response to that incipient tyranny of some of Henry’s own subjects; not so much the resisters we learn about from Bernard – high-profile politicians and churchmen, More and Fisher and Pole, or the cast of ...”

“... of the Apostles, where the crowds think that the inspired Apostles are drunk on new wine: ‘Ye may heare them speake (at the 13th verse): Well fare this same good new wine; these good fellows have been at it, and now they can speake nothing but outlandish: some little broken Greek or Latin they had, and now out it comes.’ Perhaps most striking of all is ...”

“... It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese ...”

“... at best, indiscreetly passed along and, at worst, brazenly stolen like fire from the gods, that it may bring warmth and light to others. By this transforming theft, both the narrator and Wolff demonstrate their ...”

“... the inappropriate alchemical term – by modestly noting: ‘The English equivalent offered here may sound like a turn of phrase one might encounter in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it offers a good semantic match for the Hebrew.’ (The Hebrew had merely put together two words that both mean ‘honey’.) St Hilary said that the Book of Psalms is a ...”

“... of Obiang’s opponents, who claim that torture is frequently used in Equatorial Guinea. Oil may be wrecking lives in Africa, but according to Shaxson it is equally damaging – possibly more so – to Western countries, leading, as he puts it, to ‘nothing less than the subversion of French democracy’. To make his point Shaxson takes us into a ...”

“... appetites, her secret certainly won’t be her nakedness). Kellas doesn’t twig, but the reader may remember Actaeon’s fate, transformed by Artemis into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds, thereby becoming an early victim of, as it were, friendly fire. It’s not quite The Hunt for Red October, but the quest for Astrid/Artemis in a warring world ...”

“... contentious in a cultural history that should be about how and why things change. McLaren’s book may be about attitudes and meanings, causes and cures, but impotence is something that comes, as it were, in the form of differing descriptions, that has had various meanings attached to it; and though these meanings have consequences, the condition seems ...”

“... and took up 16 full columns in the Times, the longest single dispatch in the paper’s history. In May 1936, he entered Addis Ababa with the triumphant Italian army, and saw ‘an imperial capital in ruins – buildings still burning, the stinking dead still lying in the streets, gutted houses and stores gaping blackly and emptily at us as we drove by’. His ...”

“... on. As I was beginning this review, I saw a story on the front page of the Daily Telegraph (25 May) headlined ‘Prince in the Tower “died a bricklayer”.’ The report, later taken up by other papers, was based on a book by David Baldwin, who asserts that the elder prince, the deposed Edward V, died of natural causes and that, after Richard III was ...”

“... of Muslim rule, many, perhaps most, of the eastern Christians (Greek Orthodox, Syrians, Armenians) may have remained Christian, though many were now Arabic-speakers. Tyerman attributes a key role to these eastern Christian communities, who he surmises mostly lived quite happily as tax-payers under Latin Christian rule, as they had done under Muslim ...”

“... that many people proved willing to support the campaign of mass killing and expulsion. Attitudes may well have changed, but it would be rash to assume that this is a long-term shift.In March last year, as the generals gathered in Naypyidaw for Armed Forces Day, Min Aung Hlaing spoke of his intention to ‘annihilate’ the resistance. According to most ...”

“... for example, returns from secondary school and builds a house next to her family home, so that she may live freely. She even has her own toilet installed next to her house – a symbol of modernity quietly condemned by Stefania. The spirit of amajyambere (‘progress’ in Kinyarwanda) is captured in all its ambiguity by a woman called Nyirabazungu, also ...”

“... notoriously risky to summon a demon: they are dangerous, they might not do what you want and you may not be able to get rid of them. Similarly, if inventions such as Cthulhu or R’yleh are brought into a story – powerful cults, saturated with negativity – they might not behave themselves. As Claude Lévi-Strauss understood, every version of a ...”

“... of very rich people for whom art is a status symbol. Authenticating a work is difficult, and a lot may depend on it. How might a grateful owner or potential purchaser reward such connoisseurship? The classic example is that of Bernard Berenson – in Hughes’s mocking words, ‘the disinterested, Goethean sage of I Tatti’ – who charged his employer 25 per ...”