“... law administrator’, which had been the norm. Like his predecessors, he promised he would stay in power only for a limited period, pledging in 2003 to resign as army chief of staff in 2004. Like his predecessors, he ignored his pledge. Martial law always begins with the promise of a new order that will sweep away the filth and corruption that marked the old ...”

“... scared them. It was the second wave of revolution in the late summer of 1792 that carried him to power: the attack on the Tuileries, the fall of the monarchy, the institution of the republic and the summoning of the National Convention. At a time of national emergency, with the troops of the enemy allies just 90 miles from Paris, Danton seized a position as ...”

“... of an international world order’. In the process the Congolese have paid a high price. When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in 1876 the huge landmass, mostly covered in forest and coinciding with the drainage basin of the river, had been ravaged by the slave trade and the hunt for ivory; tribal chieftains had lost out to Portuguese merchants and ...”

“... with the reek of disinfectant and urine from ‘the bogs’. Perhaps Bailey’s exceptional power of recall has to do with the contrast which even then he could draw with a very different way of life. In September 1940, at the age of seven, he had been evacuated to the USA and had spent four years with a prosperous family in Dayton, Ohio. When he got ...”

“... is what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry Louis Gates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found nothing in Wheatley’s poetry but ...”

“... per cent under 14 and 17 per cent over 65. These elderly voters keep conservative politicians in power: they resist change and hoard their savings unproductively in the local post office. Japanese social custom compounds the country’s demographic crisis. Almost every Japanese son is now an eldest son, destined to inherit the parental home, on condition ...”

“... is one of the innumerable riffs in Stein which show off her love of discriminations – as though Henry James’s intelligence has acquired a manic style – but it’s also a demonstration of an unstated theory. According to this theory, all artistic work needs to be placed within its properly domestic sphere. ‘I began with Fernande and then there were ...”

“... than just a nation, which has been paranoid about ‘foreigners telling us what to do’ since Henry VIII told the pope where he could stick it.When all this rubbish started, I thought: ‘Three years trying to get out of the EU, and the next three trying to get back in.’ Now I’m not so sure. Make it more like five years of tedious, hypocritical ...”

“... and the ‘smiling bags of death’ in the morgue across the road. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry, an awkward, anxious man with a six-inch pompadour the shape of a mushroom cloud. He inhabits a derelict, industrial planet. The film was made in a live-in studio on the grounds of the AFI, with only six or seven main cast and crew and a grant of ...”

“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself ...”

“... stature who has been content to stop with Eliot and Pound? These were early loves, of course; and Henry James, a third expatriate, comes often into his thoughts. But what Baldick chiefly holds against Leavis – that he drops out all mediations except language in order to gain the sharpest picture of ‘the creative conditions’ – is peculiarly ...”

“... give her a basic understanding of anatomy. Aged sixteen, she left the job to marry a tailor called Henry Sommers. He turned out to be an alcoholic, and to compensate for what she called his ‘dissipation and idleness’, she taught herself how to do his tailoring work. The hand-eye co-ordination required would also have been of use to her in the abortion ...”

“... perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s graceful mirror at the end of the 18th century, and Henry Adams’s eerie Wunderkammer at the beginning of the 20th. In this generally disappointing field, Eric Hobsbawm has entered the lists with a work he invites us to read as the ‘flip side’ of Age of Extremes, his great history of the 20th century: ‘not ...”

“... face’. He was amazed that this brilliant man, who had seen ‘so many people defeated by age, power and success and written so convincingly about them should have fallen into the trap set by life’. In Julian Evans’s depiction of the Havana scene in Semi-Invisible Man, we begin to understand the force of Hemingway’s decline and its effect on ...”

“... of the Myvyrian Archaiology by Iolo’s forgeries’. Hutton further discusses a whole series of power struggles, between the various modern orders of druids, with several claimants of ‘supreme authority’, ancient descent, sole right to initiate etc; between different branches of Celticism, with notable Cambro-Caledonian hostility; and, showing that some ...”