“... the Roman amphitheatre, and of the collapsed basilica and forum’? Perhaps they simply found it more convenient. The old Roman bridge across the Thames was impassable by that time, and the Strand was the first dry and elevated land west of the London Fen, and was close to the ford that was then the only crossing place. In the late seventh century a new ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A serial murder occurs when one or more individuals (males, in most known cases) commit a second murder and/or subsequent murder; is relationshipless (no prior relationship between victim and attacker); is at a different time and has no apparent connection to the initial murder; and is usually ...”

“... recession, the literature industry proceeds apace. While the market for trade books grows more enfeebled, academic publishers show no sign of cutting back on their recondite lists. Despite the dwindling number of jobs in universities (and why else are some of these books written except to secure or keep a job?), scholars continue to turn out the ...”

“... by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. More than a century later, Darwin’s name continues to divide not only the devout from the doubting, but also liberals from conservatives and biologists from social scientists. Various Darwinisms stand accused of complicity in scientific racism and sexism for ...”

“... with them, continued to distribute their movies in Germany and even pandered to the Nazi regime. Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler and Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration cover much the same ground while emphasising different aspects of the Hollywood-Hitler connection. Doherty sees the moguls who founded and ran most of the large movie studios as only one ...”

“... Several of Cunard’s early poems appeared in the Sitwells’ yearbook Wheels, and there is more than a touch of Edith Sitwell in her first book, Outlaws, published in 1921. The poem ‘Mood’ appeared in Wheels as ‘From the Train’: Smoke-stacks, coal-stacks, hay-stacks, slack, Colourless, scentless, pointless, dull, Railways, highways, roadways ...”

“... Mississippi. A lot of music flowed up and down that river, along with the laden barges. Memphis is more or less surrounded by cotton fields and small towns for two hundred miles. Nashville, the other large city in Tennessee, is regarded as a ‘white’ city and has long been thought of as the home of country music, whereas Memphis is identified with the blues ...”

“... for the material culture of classical antiquity, which Wedgwood and his business partner, Thomas Bentley, expertly harnessed. Turning away from the more flamboyantly decorated styles in which he had previously worked, including teapots in the shape of cauliflowers, Wedgwood began to emulate ancient vases, cameos and ...”

“... passage from folio 13r of MS Keynes 22, an early Elizabethan manuscript annotated by Newton more than a century later. Here he describes how King Solomon employed the ‘vegetable stone’ – a base ingredient for alchemy, combining the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) – to make ‘trees & hearbs to flourish at all times of the yeare’ and ...”

“... Bristol, and in London became a member of the Fabian Society and worked as a private secretary to Thomas Lough, a radical Liberal and supporter of Irish Home Rule. By the 1890s, MacDonald, now earning a precarious living through his journalism, was active in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and stood as its candidate in Southampton in the 1895 general ...”

“... people. Of all the alien worlds the teacher tries to call back to life, however, none seems more remote than that of the Renaissance court. True, students who read Burckhardt – as many still do – find nothing more fascinating than his accounts of courts and festivals. His analysis of how courtiers made their lives ...”

“... the American Christian Right, 29 senators out of 100 and 125 House members out of 435 – that is, more than a quarter of the members of both houses of the US Congress – voted 100 per cent of the time in accordance with the Christian Coalition’s principles in 2001 (the last year for which figures are available). These figures will be even higher in the new ...”

“... I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order ...”

“... Steve McQueen’s fame in 1968, after a run of huge box-office successes – The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder by 13 years and a star for more than twenty, who was voted the screen’s ‘godfather of cool’ on America’s university campuses.Both men had got to where ...”