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“... Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in Simon’s case had turned out to be demonic. Magic also seemed unnecessary to some commentators, who exalted human-wrought wonders such as shipbuilding, navigation, land reclamation, explosives, cryptography and mechanical automata – a tradition ...”

“... gained too soon or too late. Such political and personal struggles are a gift to a historian like Thomas Penn, who believes that events are more often driven by strong characters than by impersonal forces. In 2012, Penn’s Winter King – a biography of Henry VII focusing on the last seven years of his life – brilliantly recreated the claustrophobia that ...”

“... point him out; Each Waiter with an eager eye Observes him as he passes by: That there he is, do, Thomas! Look Who’s wrote such a damn’d clever Book. ‘I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous,’ Sterne later said, famously, in a letter probably designed for future publication. By fame he did not mean immortality, such as Pope might have ...”

“... in the United States – imaginatively reconstructing the ideas and actions of the imperial powers in the past can seem dangerously close to condoning racism, brutality and Eurocentricity in the present. The only valid questions about empire, in this view, are why so many Europeans were so complicit in such an obvious evil for so long, and how ...”

“... influence. He was the chief draftsman of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which greatly extended the powers of the papacy over the universal church. As nuncio to Germany from 1917 until 1929 he developed a lifelong love of Germany and its culture, and emerged as one of the architects of the papacy’s European diplomatic policy, particularly the ...”

“... law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry – usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, but it too can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle – is often expressed in relation to the rule of judges. But it is really a worry about rule by officials. They might be judges, but they could also be police officers, administrators and ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak multitude). Locke’s State of Nature was much less ...”

“... churches. He places the emergence of the modern state too early and exaggerates its centralised powers. The court, like the bourgeoisie, is always rising, in a way calculated to cause modern eyebrows to rise with it. Elias’s underlying assumptions can also be questioned. He recognised that the term ‘civilised’ needs inverted commas, but that has not ...”

“... 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in Thomas Sadleir’s An Irish Peer on the Continent (1920) and in Lady Londonderry and H.M. Hyde’s The Russian Journals and Letters of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (1934). For the present selection, which covers both tours, Elizabeth Mavor has gone back to the ...”

“... or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb proliferated, and new nuclear powers emerged, driven by conflicts scarcely related to superpower confrontation. Thanks to the collapse of communism, we are no longer sure that ‘the golden age is within us,’ as Lévi-Strauss said, but there’s no doubt that the apocalypse is. And the fear ...”

“... in the first, formative years after the Bolshevik Revolution, when almost all the capitalist powers sent military forces to support the Bolsheviks’ opponents in the Civil War, most of the resident foreigners, with the exception of Comintern personnel, were indeed quasi-spies reporting to some foreign intelligence agency, even those with good contacts ...”

“... in his complaints about European free-riders. Others attribute its origins to the persuasive powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its ...”

“... for particular effects, in ‘Wolf Tongue’ (1978), for example, he faked an excellent version of Thomas Chatterton’s (already fake) mode. Another poem in his ambit is probably Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl (1985), a dream-allegorical confrontation in which malign powers are named with outlandish blazons ...”

“... 1798, Pitt introduced income tax. This was not a strikingly original conception. Two years earlier Thomas Love Peacock, aged 11, had written that while he did not wish ‘Mr Pitt’s removal from his exalted station’, he thought Pitt ‘would have acted more in conformity with the wishes of the People had he taxed everyone according to their ...”

“... there were rival, Catholic claimants to the British throne backed by the other main European naval powers, France and Spain. Even in the 1780s, Britain was engaged in a frantic naval race against these two countries, which France might have won. European imperatives, and persistent and legitimate fears that the Catholic ...”