“... in 1660 is apparent. More revealing was the seal’s association of freedom with what the royalist John Evelyn, surveying the measures of early 1649, scathingly termed ‘unkingship’. Corruption, even tyranny, are the inexorable accompaniments of monarchy because of the fawning and flattery kings always engender in others. Monarchy is dangerous since all ...”

“... of biography immortalised by one author’s comment in a Life of St Teresa of Avila that ‘St John of the Cross bit his lip.’ If Feinstein has ever come under the influence of this school, which I doubt, she has long since renounced it. When she wishes to give us a telling visual detail she selects, if not from actual documents then from very strong ...”

“... Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real and imaginary, deliberately extinguish some aspect of their personality in order to find out a hidden (and often unpleasant) truth. Levine calls these willed acts of self-suppression ‘something ...”

“... purpose, it could turn them to murder. Indian police reports regularly associated the drug with major crime. It was also thought to induce madness. Insane asylums claimed that substantial proportions of their inmates had come to them in this way. You could tell which they were simply by looking at them, Surgeon Hutchinson of the Patna asylum wrote in ...”

“... political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half ...”

“... In Los Angeles, his classes attracted Oscar Levant, the film composer Alfred Newman and John Cage. Schoenberg lamented his students’ ignorance but was happy teaching non-musicians. (One of his students was Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball.) Schoenberg was ...”

“... of Hykkara in Sicily (Thucydides). Aristotle in the Politics included Carthage in his survey of major constitutions.The Copenhagen Polis Centre spent ten years (from 1993 to 2003) charting and analysing 1035 city-states. John Ma’s book, in some respects a monumental update of A.M.H. Jones’s The Greek City ...”

“... is in dissent, the senior justice in the majority does the assigning. The current chief justice is John Roberts, who was nominated in 2005 by George W. Bush. Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia ...”

“... with his harsh and jagged short story ‘El Pozo’ (‘The Pit’), 1939; and when he did get a major literary prize, the Cervantes, it was in 1978, late enough for the legend of neglect to be maintained. We get a recent picture of Onetti in Ramon Chao’s book (Onetti, 1990), although not an entirely reliable one perhaps. Partly because he behaves a little ...”

“... much where we are now. In the early Eighties I used to give talks to the middle managers of a major oil company about the changing international environment. It was my custom to flash up on the projector a map of Orwell’s world in 1984, with the globe divided into the great blocs of Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia. While there was, I said, little Sign of ...”

“... Conrad (1960), in which the biographer, having related at length the circumstances in which each major work was written, proceeds to provide a literary-critical essay on it – is generally agreed to be a bastard form, a matter of two quite different books finding themselves within the same pair of covers. Why this must be so is fairly easily seen. For one ...”

“... most of them would have served in the Church of England with reasonable good grace. This was a major reformulation of national life, ensuring that thereafter the Established Church was never so overwhelmingly hegemonic in England as were Scandinavian Lutheranism or Mediterranean Catholicism in their respective spheres. English and Welsh Protestantism ...”

“... a quieter, more discriminating classical figure, Clio, the Muse of History. In the world of those major goddesses it is ‘As though no one dies in particular/And gossip were never true’. Clio by contrast isMuse of Time, but for whose merciful silenceOnly the first step would count and thatWould always be murder.She is to ‘forgive our noises/And teach us ...”

“... lives: the slave-owners received cash or cheques. The struggles of enslaved people, including the major rebellion of 1831 which finally convinced the British Parliament that chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius had to end, resulted in semi-freedom. The system of ‘apprenticeship’, which bound freed men and women to work for ...”

“... policing make the continent attractive to groups like al-Qaida, and the Pentagon has two major anti-terrorist operations in sub-Saharan Africa: a base in the tiny Red Sea state of Djibouti (sandwiched between Somalia and Eritrea) monitors the movements of suspected terrorists and the Pan Sahel Initiative is intended to hunt down jihadists in the ...”