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“... ambitious project. Its guiding spirit was Henry’s ‘angel-tongued’ lord chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the man in whom, as the Venetian ambassador put it, ‘the whole power of the state is really lodged’. In war-ravaged 15th-century Europe, an old idea began to gain new impetus: the dream of a unified Christendom, bound together by its one ...”

“... quasi-legal fiat issued in 1823 from a position of relative weakness: the US decreed that European powers were barred from meddling in its zone of influence; inside that zone, it would decide what was peace, what was intervention, and what was security. For National Socialists in the 1930s, the power to make all legal questions of sovereignty answer to ...”

“... and the Ottomans, and at various moments they openly acknowledged the superiority of the Muslim powers with which Elizabeth repeatedly put England on friendly terms.’ Elizabethan England’s encounter with Islam was not a clash of civilisations – not least because England’s status as ‘civilised’ was hardly settled in early modern ...”

“... Beatification, which finally came to Thomas More in 1886, and canonisation, which had to wait until 1935, were only the icing on the commemorative cake. He had had, both during his life and since, a deserved measure of admiration as a scholar, a lawyer, a writer and a politician; for there is much in Robert Bolt’s adulatory A Man for All Seasons which reflects what we know of More ...”

“... law, by interfering with judicial independence? Is the Government minded to hobble the judges’ powers to review the way in which ministers and other public officers exercise their powers? Should British courts be given greater powers to remedy breaches of basic human rights and ...”

“... Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern promise, but also one which, having been invited to the banquet of the ...”

“... another indiscriminately, produce children well into their seventies, are in awe of the medical powers of the white people, poke and prod at strangers, can’t resist the urge to groom and braid any long hair that comes their way, and are functionally language-less, since none of the English-speakers can speak Lakashi – isn’t exactly not racist. It’s ...”

“... Renzi called a referendum on the next stage of electoral reform, which included reducing the powers of the senate, and said he’d resign if it didn’t pass, which immediately turned it into a referendum on his leadership – unsurprising, really, considering that no one outside his party had voted for him to be prime minister. He duly lost and duly ...”

“... far as we can piece it together from his prose, Nature is always credited with deep health-giving powers: it’s good for the instincts, good for the imagination and good for our animal self-knowledge, should we want that too. In his most effective verses, though, Nature is mostly seen as hostile. It may be good for us but it wants nothing from us in ...”

“... most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even then, MBS’s biggest fans continued to ...”

“... and early 1590s, the so-called ‘pre-Shakespearean’ period. Not a single play by the sonneteer Thomas Watson remains, though he was described in 1592 as one whose ‘daily practyse and living’ was writing for the theatre. Thomas Nashe certainly wrote for the public playhouses in the early 1590s – his friend Greene ...”

“... however, the medical profession has ‘forgotten’ what it once knew about its therapeutic powers. This is not hard to explain. In studies of traditional contraception and abortion practices, John Riddle has demonstrated how often knowledge of therapeutic agents formerly possessed by the folk memory and by medical practitioners has been ...”

“... be paid out of a large media organisation’s petty cash. An independent regulator with penal powers is a perfectly reasonable solution. Nevertheless, statutory regulation, although hardly a constitutional novelty, is not at present on the cards. What has emerged from the parliamentary crisis is something that is arguably misdescribed as statutory ...”

“... he coedited with René Hague, and forbade their publication during his own lifetime. Now, however, Thomas Dilworth has edited them as Wedding Poems. It’s a handsome-looking volume. There are photographs of Jones and the Grisewoods along with reproductions of some of Jones’s paintings of the time. There is also extensive critical and biographical commentary ...”

“... across a continent has a certain raffish hilarity to it and once produced a study called Dylan Thomas in America. This book is a sort of ‘Dylan Thomas in Africa’, with the difference that Breytenbach has written this one himself and cares about the continent he’s travelling through and getting drunk in. As he ...”