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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is convincing. Fashion wasn’t considered superficial or thought of as a lesser art. As Shade Thomas-Fahm, a Nigerian designer whose work is displayed in the ‘Vanguard’ section of the exhibition, writes: ‘It was the time of Fela, and Wole Soyinka’s plays … It was a time of Nigeria evolving. We were bringing in new ideas … Arts and culture were ...”

“... Thomas Friedman is so much the kind of American that the rest of the world likes to despise that it’s a fair assumption he has, at least in part, adopted the pose consciously. He calls himself a ‘tourist with attitude’ and his attitude is that of the know-it-all, ‘wise up, you dumb cluck’ American journalist who is here to tell you your economy is blown, your politics stink and you haven’t a hope in hell of making it in today’s world ...”

“... most of his readers (not to mention reviewers) aren’t physicists, this falling off in Beard’s powers is a convenient fig leaf, though it’s also of thematic relevance – Solar is concerned, among other things, with ageing, decay and decline – and necessary to the plot. But once a physicist, always a physicist. Beard goes to Tarpin’s house to ...”

“... in Hampstead in 1852, he realised that what he was looking at was a proper subject for ‘the powers of an English painter’. It took Brown 13 years to finish this ambitious picture. He endlessly packed and re-packed the picture to accommodate more thought, more observation, further depths of conviction. It was a painting that became a manifesto, a text ...”

“... the Community; some sought election in order to ‘free’ the Parliament’s existing powers; others wanted to boycott the whole affair. Some Conservatives, several of them in high places, were afraid of seeming ‘too European’; and the Liberals, however enthusiastic, were defrauded by Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which ...”