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“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a verdict that Lewis was not, but Mansfield ...”

“... justify plucking an archaic remedy (legislative removal of the executive despite the separation of powers) from the Constitutional museum? To do so, they had to exaggerate wildly the magnitude of the damage done to the country by Clinton’s attempt to draw a veil of secrecy over his unconsummated fumblings with a young woman who was not his wife. In the ...”

“... that would make Joseph Goebbels proud’. Eurozone finance ministers found Varoufakis hard work. Thomas Wieser, the former head of the Eurogroup Working Group, an advisory body to Eurozone finance ministers, recently told a Swiss newspaper that during meetings Varoufakis kept up long monologues, delaying real negotiations in the hope that a last-minute panic ...”

“... were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of Worcester Cathedral, also lately a Benedictine monastery. While abbot of Evesham, Hawford had been a loyal henchman of Cromwell’s, but as dean at ...”

“... that most of it was given over to an attack on traditional history. In a keynote article, Keith Thomas argued that British historians, immersed in fact-grubbing studies of political and constitutional events, were decades behind their colleagues in other countries. Political history, he urged, must be dethroned in favour of a new social history based on ...”

“... who was a queen herself for a spell: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. In an age when Thomas More showed his radical mettle by according his daughters the same education as his sons, Anne had been allowed to cultivate her mind to an unusual degree; she had also corresponded with Marguerite, with whom she shared an interest in Reform theology and ...”

“... him to establish his Weekly in the dark days of the Republican Fifties. Stone has always revered Thomas Jefferson, and espoused a leftish liberalism intended to recall America to her mission as the best hope of the common man rather than the conservative super-power she has too often become. At the same time, he has preached the need to marry Marx and ...”

“... are less clear. In his excellent book on the decline of magic in 17th-century England, Keith Thomas stated the problem. Having shown how belief in the supernatural was dethroned on the one hand by the spread of scientific attitudes and on the other by a new Protestant ethic of self-help and stoicism in the face of suffering, he concluded, with admirable ...”

“... four parallel texts on the page (edited from the lucubrations of the great and good Sir Thomas Urquhart, a fellow Scottish patriot and eccentric genius), prints the vowels and consonants of a passage on separate pages, and interrupts the text with blank sections (where the manuscript was supposedly nibbled by mice). Not all of Gray’s literary ...”

“... than its counterinsurgency campaigns before and since. Far from it. Intelligence played a part, as Thomas Leahy convincingly sets out, but a far from decisive one. The British public, only intermittently aroused by dramatic events such as Bloody Sunday or the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979, didn’t think much about Northern Ireland. Successive ...”

“... ultimately on grounds that are independent of testimony and accessible to each individual’s powers of reason, memory and observation. For this objection to succeed, reason, memory and observation must themselves be cleansed of testimony. For as Coady points out, much of what passes for observation is already enriched by the testimony of other ...”

“... the ‘famous art’ – is magic. The play is part of the Renaissance debate about magic: its powers, its permissibility, its pitfalls. It poses the basic Elizabethan question about magic: liberation or damnation? There has been an upsurge of interest in Renaissance occultism recently, due partly to Jung’s interest in the psychodynamics of magic, and ...”

“... protégée was ‘so unshaped in some ways’, he wrote urging her to develop her ‘prostitute powers’: ‘This is the way, first to disillusionment, secondly to knowledge, thirdly to freedom from inferiorities and fourthly to anything that may be worthwhile.’ This, from a curly-headed minor who, to compound his cheek, ordered her to read the whole of ...”

“... in libidinous excess. The rhetorical forces of primitive Christianity confronted the demonic powers of Wall Street. In this rhetoric there was ‘a certain gravitas, an undercurrent of apocalyptic finality … foreign to our sense of things today’. Religious language raised the stakes in the struggle against concentrated capital. This was true for ...”

“... against your will or take away your liberty. Whether psychiatrists acknowledge or even want these powers, they come with the territory. It’s ironic, to say the least, that conditions whose biomedical basis is so uncertain should generate diagnoses that are so consequential. These statutory powers aren’t a recent ...”