“... court, thus restoring the element of personal interaction to politics, and to government too. John Guy and others subjected the ideology and praxis of the Cromwellian reforms to detailed scrutiny. Insofar as English government was reinvented, anticipating and partly realising the emergence of the state as a public thing, the whole credit was not ...”

“... rented an adult film on motel pay-per-view. They were the victims of ‘total surveillance’, as John Parker calls it. Yet it mattered little – Atta’s driver’s licence may not have been in order but there were some 200,000 outstanding traffic warrants in Broward County. The attacks of 11 September both reinforced and exploded the fashionable myth that ...”

“... the depth of the greatest geological faultline in European civilisation. MacCulloch’s other major contention is demanding of the imaginative powers of his readers, many of whom will find themselves excluded from the mental, and especially the theological world of the 16th and 17th centuries. This was before all else a religious revolution, not to be ...”

“... restructure and reform the prisons in Iraq, including Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, both condemned by Major-General Antonio Taguba as the sites of ‘egregious acts and grave breaches of international law’. Or that Terry Stewart, the former director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, who began the now prohibited practice of ‘dog frights’ in the ...”

“... from Flanders to Damaraland in southern Africa, fetching, carrying and fighting, as the three major European powers mortgaged their empires on the Western Front. Germany was scandalised by the deployment of ‘barbarians’ in Europe, both at the time and later. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Hitler gave orders to destroy a statue of Mangin in the ...”

“... airport on 3 January, wasn’t the head of a terrorist organisation but a state official: a major-­general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the leader of its Quds Force, the unit re­spons­ible for external and clandestine oper­at­ions. He was a pivotal player in the reg­ion and, at times, its most brilliant military strategist. Iran’s ...”

“... He dissected aspects of French intellectual and political life in long review-essays in the major periodicals, notably La Revue des deux mondes. Two collections of these pieces, Essais de morale et de critique (1859), and then La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (1871), established him as one of the most respected commentators on the ...”

“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

“... Speaking​ of his remarkable version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, John Ashbery said: ‘I myself try to be very literal, and I frequently use cognates even when they might sound a little strange in English.’ ‘Are there times when that doesn’t work?’ his interviewer, Claude Peck, asked. Ashbery replied without hesitation: ‘Oh sure, on every page, many times ...”

“... National Democratic Party, the RCD was a functional tool of the regime, so its abolition was a major achievement. (The old party HQ, a glass tower opposite the central bank and the ‘museum of money’, now contains a lesser ministry of state.) The sit-in at Kasbah Square was kept up until the prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, resigned on 27 ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... too much of a digest: the notes to Chapter Two contain 27 consecutive references to two books by John Barron. Despite the enormous Soviet investment in technical intelligence, Richelson considers its importance smaller than in the United States, because of inferior Soviet technology and the much greater opportunities in the West for both humint operations ...”

“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ as ‘the only poem in which Davidson freed himself completely from the poetic diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares ...”

“... are emblems of nobility and knighthood such as money cannot, traditionally, buy. There is one major claim in Alpers’s book that I have not yet mentioned. It is that ‘Rembrandt contrived to see or at least to represent life as if it were a studio event’ – a ‘studio event’ implying for her a piece of improvised theatre. Quasi-theatrical events ...”