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“... account he gives. One must assume that ‘economic and social history’ means everything from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s ...”

“... had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to His Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his government’, a condition which they had no difficulty in meeting. Similar orders were issued in 1674 and 1685, and in 1700 Solomon de Medina became the first Jew to receive an English knighthood. In David Katz’s words, ‘once ...”

“... to colonialism (‘a society sectarianised by the Willimite confiscations and the Penal Laws’). This leaves the term unexamined, along with the politics of the Irish Churches themselves. Nor was Ireland the only corner of Europe where the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) had divisive cultural and political consequences. The anthology’s most ...”

“... be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have had the poet’s image in mind. Bramhall almost certainly did, taking Donne’s account of the conspiracy of the swordfish and the thresher fish against the ...”

“... Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked ...”

“... John Sutherland has produced ‘a calendar following a series of events (mostly trials) from 1960 to the present day’, which deals briefly and brightly with obscenity cases from Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill to The Romans in Britain.* The aim is to investigate changes in public attitudes to ‘offensive literature ...”

“... science’ – the modern science of the mind, and of possible minds. The idea that there might be laws of thought transcending our intelligence is rooted in antiquity; Aristotelian logic was long regarded as a statement of such laws, and in modern times the mathematical logician feels free to ignore the feebleness of human ...”

“... dilemma: how could reason play an effective part in a physical world governed by uniform natural laws? How could thinking make a difference in reality? His solution, which involved an immaterial ‘mind or soul’ interacting with the brain, may well be as ridiculous as most people now think; but the general argument – that an understanding of the brain ...”

“... Peel’s government failed to carry its own backbenchers with it over the repeal of the Corn Laws. Though the Tory MPs who voted for protection were a majority in the Party, the Free Traders had a clear majority in the House of Commons as a whole, since the Peelites were supported by the Whigs. Indeed, the subsequent formation of the Liberal ...”

“... and OK! magazine. Not that external regulation has worked either. Recent disclosures, including John Yates’s frank admission that his failure to reopen the hacking investigation in 2009 was ‘pretty crap’, suggest that police action against reporters’ malfeasance is as hopeless as the PCC’s. As Stewart Tendler, a Times crime reporter, put ...”

“... of Europe, notably Britain, the American Revolution may still be unfinished. Looking back in 1818, John Adams asked a fundamental question: ‘But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people; a change in their religious ...”

“... while a trader said: ‘You have to understand, it’s us against the bank.’ The rules, the laws, are annoyances to be fought against and worked around, all in pursuit of the only thing which is real: profit. The changes to banking proposed by the commissions and the government have to be mediated through the existing culture of banking. Too many ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... for being captured 13 times and 17 times sold into slavery, going from the Ethiopia of Prester John to the Japan of the Daimyos and St Francis Xavier? Some say that he was a prodigy, as well as one of the great Portuguese classics, the prose equivalent of Camoens; others say that he was a liar. Rebecca Catz says that he was a satirist, that his whole ...”

“... victim, according to the new economic thinking, of a fundamental misunderstanding of labour market laws of supply and demand. So public policy again changed track, and moved not towards socialism, but towards liberal-collectivist state welfare and a planned economy as advocated by Beveridge and Keynes. We thought we knew every vale of tears in this landscape ...”