“... and villages, clearly targeting non-military objectives. Hundreds have been killed, and thousands more have fled: in one incident, the Azeris showered cluster bombs on homes in an Armenian-populated city. But the military efficacy of drones on the actual battlefield is less obvious. The Azeris did grind out territorial gains, but in fighting that largely ...”

“... was plunged into the serial conflicts we call the Thirty Years War.From The Hague, Elizabeth spent more than two decades pursuing restitution of her husband’s Palatine lands and privileges, alternately assisted and frustrated by the fortunes of the Stuart monarchy in Britain. The dust jacket of Nadine Akkerman’s biography shows a composite portrait of ...”

“... military logic of their Chiefs of Staff if and when the issue arises of using nuclear weapons? On more than one occasion the political control which the Prime Minister insisted was being exercised over the Royal Navy. Lord Lewin, incumbent Chief of the Defence Staff in 1982, has described how the War Cabinet came to authorise the mid-April retaking of South ...”

“... and smaller devotional pictures. Such works set a standard for later artists, one that was all the more authoritative in that Raphael’s figure style seemed to be based on the most prestigious model, the art of classical antiquity. That Raphael himself largely invented this interpretation of ancient art, on the basis of a few statues, most of them very ...”

“... have a deep-seated conviction?’Logic and certainty depart. After an investigation that produced more than a million pages of documents, and a ten-month trial featuring hundreds of witnesses, the cour d’assises was told to go with its gut.The deliberations came to an end on 29 June, when nineteen of the twenty defendants were found guilty of participating ...”

“... is why Mr Mortimer chose this moment of his life to write this book. One senses a motivation more pressing than the importunities of hopeful publishers. There is hardly a publisher in London who doesn’t solicit a known name to write a book on the specious ground that everyone has a book inside him. The accumulation of unreadable books proves the ...”

“... endless cabinet committees and a full-blown public enquiry, the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Thomas Dugdale, during the course of the Commons debate, announced his resignation. If relatively small events can excite such interest in Parliamentary minds, it is not surprising that there are plenty of people prepared to rake over the coals, at an appropriate ...”

“... republic of letters. Despite its geographical remoteness, and in part because of it, it sent its more ambitious and industrious sons almost everywhere abroad to study. The three universities of medieval foundation were essentially undergraduate colleges, but, as John Durkan has shown, Scots as students and teachers had roamed abroad since the 15th century to ...”

“... was given a further boost by a rare, cryptic – and surprisingly ungainly – endorsement from Thomas Pynchon, who described Mills’s novel as a ‘demented, deadpan comic wonder’ with ‘the exuberant power of a magic word it might possibly be dangerous (like the title of a certain other Scottish tale) to speak out loud’. Later, a great deal of ...”

“... morning harden upon the wall.’ One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom ...”

“... first great celebrant was James. The fact that there are no Jamesian novels being produced any more – if there ever were, apart from the Master’s own – does not alter the perspective. The Jamesian model remains a standard, an archetype, against which contemporary impurities and laxities are measured. The importance of James lies not so much in his ...”

“... the person you’re most likely to take dictation from: before the 1870s, shorthand was used more often for recording one’s own thoughts or for copying others’, not always with permission. In early modern England, tachygraphy, tachography, zeitography, zeiglography, semigraphy, semography all vied for the loyalty of court recorders, parliamentary ...”

“... of justice. South Africa’s decision, which will become effective after a one-year delay, is more serious. On paper its constitution is one of the best; South Africa is also the continent’s do-or-die liberal-democratic model. Last year Bashir’s attendance at an African Union summit in Johannesburg was cut short by a local court’s decision to have ...”

“... currently on display in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (until 5 April), is a towering monument – more than forty feet tall – based loosely on Thomas Brock’s Victoria Memorial of 1911, which stands outside Buckingham Palace. Walker, an African-American artist who was born in California and lives in New York, first saw ...”

“... a go at him to get some money,’ Reynolds told the police, ‘he gave me 10p and when I asked for more he said he didn’t have any and that’s when we started to stab him.’ There was also some mention of ‘dirty looks’, and these, real or imagined, probably did more to provoke the attackers. To describe the assault ...”