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“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... were just unusually aggressive, even by the high standards of Roman and post-Roman Europe. In 1689 Thomas Bartholinus the Younger published his compilation of excerpts from the poems and sagas in an attempt to explain ‘the contempt for death among the still pagan Danes’. He concluded that their endemic fearlessness was powered by a religion and an ethos ...”

“... by the maths master. In less than fifteen years, Vaughan – who had been a favourite pupil of Thomas Arnold at Rugby – transformed the school, spiritually, sanitarily and commercially. He raised money for a fashionable chapel by George Gilbert Scott as well as new boarding houses, decently appointed and, from the mid-1850s, complete with water ...”

“... in the back and three times in the head. A pathologist later agreed that the third IRA member Sean Savage had been ‘riddled with bullets’ in what looked like a ‘frenzied attack’. He was hit 16 times, with a number of bullets entering his head while he lay on the ground. Witnesses to the shootings of Farrell and McCann also claimed they had been shot ...”

“... baneful. But there can be no mistaking his enormous gift, especially in phrasing and diction (‘a savage servility/slides by on grease’), not to mention the matchless force and aptness of his descriptive language. Some of his poems are so indelibly part of the poetic voice of his era that, however much one might disapprove of him, to discount his importance ...”

“... Rutherford’s gathering of previously unpublished or uncollected early poems, and Professor Thomas Pinney’s selection from the early journalism: special reports, feature articles, social notes, reviews and comic sketches written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette between 1884 and 1888. Both editors acknowledge the rawness of the work they have ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... the benefits of slave ownership and colonialism, could achieve the virtues of individual liberty. Thomas Friedman’s recommendations to the world’s stragglers included the ‘values of hard work, thrift, honesty, patience and tenacity’, as well as ‘export-oriented free market strategies based on privatisation of state companies, deregulation of ...”

“... to Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from ...”

“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the ...”

“... to a summary halt by the heavy-handed intervention of the Inkatha feudal boss of nearby Lindelani, Thomas Shabalala. Shabalala is a classic figure of squatter life – the shacklord who takes rent or tribute from his subjects, providing them in return with law and order enforced by his own impi of strong-arm men. Thanks to Shabalala, Lindelani is a peaceful ...”

“... guarantees generously, with full regard to international standards of human rights. Sir Thomas Bingham’s Court of Appeal has insisted that the more substantial the interference with human rights, the more the courts will require by way of justification of the ‘reasonableness’ of the decision. The outdated technical rules that prevented ...”

“... argued in an autumnal and even conciliatory reflection on Wagner published several years after his savage book on the composer, ‘Wagner is the first case of uncompromising musical nominalism ... the first in which the primacy of the individual work of art, and within the work the primacy of figure, in its concrete elaborated reality, is established ...”

“... of Nijinsky’s startling performance at the hotel he began to write a diary – a series of savage declarations, the mirror (or the blackboard) of a creative mind on the slide, incorporating letters to people he loved or loathed. As the diary ends he is on his way to see Eugen Bleuler – the man who came up with the word ‘schizophrenic’ – and not ...”