“... year that the Children’s Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The ...”

“... sometimes imagine: there were many devout Christians who were sceptical of the whole phenomenon. Thomas Hobbes was one of several who saw it as a metaphor for mental illness. Spinoza seems to have believed the same. From the early years of the Renaissance, plenty of physicians claimed that demonic possession had natural causes. So did some of their ancient ...”

“... render the poem freely. In the end, the translator’s mode matters less than his or her poetic powers, which may manifest themselves in an empathy with Dante’s style and emotions, and in the handling of rhythm, forms of sonority and verbal intensity. As a medieval Catholic writer, Dante was foreign to post-Reformation English taste, not only in England ...”

“... Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point. Punch at least seems to have established a lasting reputation along the Nile, because it was by those shores that the ...”

“... 1768 and Smollett in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Holcroft – with whom Bage is most commonly linked – had yet begun to publish. In these ...”

“... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...”

“... a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Erik Midelfort. Until very recently, however, it was the history of trials on the Continent alone that seemed a lively subject, and in 1996 Diane Purkiss could still properly complain of ‘the torpor of English witchcraft studies’. It was as if ...”

“... when it came to the defeat of Japan but had marked the starting point of the Cold War.Evan Thomas, author of several respectful works on various pillars of the Washington establishment, will have none of that. Summarising a selection of critiques of the bombing, he declares that ‘the facts are otherwise.’ His consideration of the Soviet Union’s ...”

“... to carry Emma Tennant’s ambitious satiric investigation of a whole country in transition. Alice Thomas Ellis’s new heroine runs true to type: she’s sardonic, occasionally malicious, with a snobbishness that hovers uncertainly between the material and spiritual worlds. But Mrs Monro in The Skeleton in the Cupboard is very old, and much preoccupied with ...”

“... and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that ...”

“... out by drones. And despite having written academic papers backing a powerful and restrictive War Powers Act, he made the legal case for the Obama administration’s right to make war on Libya without bothering to get congressional approval. Koh, who has now returned to teaching human rights law, is not the only human rights advocate to call for the use of ...”

“... The bicentennial of 2019 celebrated the arrival of the city-state’s ‘founding father’, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, whose name graces countless schools and institutions, the famous hotel, and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today,’ the prime minister, Lee ...”

“... why Caesar? Suetonius goes some way towards providing part of the answer. He had ‘unbelievable powers of endurance’, never rushed into anything blind – he didn’t invade Britain ‘until he had personally organised a survey of the ports, the passage and the approaches to the island’ – but also, once committed to an action, wouldn’t back out. He ...”

“... Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional writing for the New England Journal of Medicine have brought him a large following. The Youngest Science will meet his fans’ highest expectations ...”

“... the period of enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers ...”