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“... features. In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, recalled for him by the prophet Daniel, the Babylonian King sees a giant image with a head made of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. Here is not only the same sequence of metals as in Hesiod and Plato, but, with the localisation of the metals to ...”

“... while swords and skulls were shuffled into the background. See the title of the late Peter Foote’s The Viking Achievement (1970). Ferguson, though long based in Norway, was a pupil of Foote’s and although he early on declares an interest in restoring ‘the violence to the Viking Age’, his training still shows, notably at the end of Chapter ...”

“... bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... amoral southerners, barely able to conceal their wish to take over the kingship. As for the king, at the start of the books that is Robert Baratheon, the huge bruiser who, with help from the Starks, deposed the previous king 17 years before the story begins. That monarch, mad ...”

“... use in peace-keeping operations. ‘If we lose that war-fighting capability,’ Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge remarked in a lecture last year, ‘I believe the British Army will be on the road to becoming a sort of gendarmerie which can provide a battalion here and a battalion there but frankly has lost its ability to go to war.’ It is almost inconceivable ...”

“... backed off and charged again, while the nanny waited nearby, a seemingly dispassionate spectator. Peter Coates’s study of the evolving meanings of ‘nature’, in Europe and North America, is preoccupied with the human tendency to invade nature, altering, exploiting and ‘reinventing’ it. He culls a telling image from the Guardian for 9 August ...”

“... example of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court ...”

“... made by the BBC, several websites and the syndication of photographic rights across the globe. Peter Firstbrook’s book is written from a very English perspective, Ghosts of Everest from a very American one: neither takes up the really important issues. The Last Climb began life as a history of all the early Everest expeditions but, once Mallory’s body ...”

“... of the Press’ and the self-interrogating sections from Ukulele Music warn the reviewer of Peter Reading that he risks becoming entangled in his subject like a gladiator in a net. Even his editors at Secker (not to mention the printer) must feel unnerved – which is excellent. This is poetry at its most unpredictable: we wouldn’t be surprised to ...”

“... One of the first people in England to benefit from insulin treatment was a young physician at King’s College Hospital, R.D. Lawrence, who survived to become England’s principal authority on diabetes. The experiments carried out by the Toronto team were, as sometimes happens when great discoveries are announced, the subject of sour and unfair ...”

“... history, he uses this question to make a case for the non-inevitability of a clash between the King and his English Parliaments, had he not simultaneously mismanaged his Scottish kingdom (not to mention Ireland). Clark works from some of the same premises about the putative viability of Stuart rule in questioning whether the American Revolution was ...”

“... common servant, but her unusual beauty and even more unusual luck brought her to the attention of Peter the Great, who made her first his mistress, then his wife, and finally his successor. She became Tsarina Catherine I, and from 1725 to 1727 she reigned as absolute monarch over an empire that already stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific. ...”

“... Number ten in the Unwin Critical Library, Peter Makin’s book is very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract new readers to Pound ’s immense poem; and in fact one of its great virtues is that it doesn’t try to minimise how difficult The Cantos is, and always will be. The difficulties are of three kinds: first, those inseparable from the nature of the enterprise (i ...”

“... rebellion; and that the target of such rebellion was the specifically ‘Anglican’ sovereign of King-in-Parliament born during the English Reformation, confirmed by the Restoration settlement, and pronounced mature after the Glorious Revolution. In the context of the British Atlantic world, the American Revolution was accordingly a ‘rebellion of natural ...”

“... global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised ...”