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“... In 1632 Loudun was a frontier town, with Catholicism to the north, south and east, and Protestantism to the west. Internally divided, it was in the process of being recaptured by the new religious orders of the Counter-Reformation (the Jesuits arrived in 1606, the Capuchins in 1616, the Ursulines in 1626); while at the same time Richelieu was planning to destroy the town’s castle, thus turning its citizens into subjects of the absolutist state ...”

“... that the cold weather was the result of a ‘dry’ fog high in the atmosphere over Europe and North America which blocked the sun’s rays. ‘The cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained,’ but one possible source was the ‘vast quantity of smoke, long continuing to issue during the summer from Hecla in Iceland, and that other volcano which ...”

“... In​ 1836, Benjamin Shaw looked back on a life of toil in the textile factories of the North-East. He was a skilled worker, but had lived in poverty for years, buried his wife and four of his children, had a leg amputated (diseased as a result of unhealthy working conditions), and been left to care for his illegitimate orphaned granddaughter ...”

“... band of Trojans, the last remnants of a once mighty civilisation, have been beached on the North African sands, obliged to throw themselves on the Carthaginians’ mercy. History and legend may be more reliable prognosticators than the promises of a fictional god. Troy fell; Carthage fell; why should Rome be any different?The Roman Empire reached its ...”

“... associations of the term ‘coalition’ are deep-rooted in British politics. The short-lived Fox-North coalition of 1783 became a byword for low cynicism and a willingness to seize power at whatever cost. According to George III, it was ‘the most daring and unprincipled faction that the annals of the kingdom ever produced’. Military defeat in the ...”

“... The institution has in fact often changed identity. It began by being British but took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was ...”

“... which says that its coming was predicted in the Bible: ‘Then came a generation which knew not Joseph.’ Jack is prominent amongst those who knew not Bronislaw. This being so, one is bound to look in his latest book for evidence concerning which way anthropology is going. In his previous work, Jack Goody has already done a great deal to give the subject a ...”

“... much more than the boundaries of good taste, it would be difficult to tell from The Farthest North of Humanness. The philistine reaction to flagellation and sexual experiment was exactly what Grainger wanted, of course, and the reponse to this monster volume of letters, assisted by some unintentionally comic editing, is likely to be one that would have ...”

“... wakes she was appalled at his appearance, as we learn from the editor’s coda to the diary: ‘Joseph, Mary and Jesus,’ she says she said, ‘what have they done to you?’ The Arthur who loathed perfume and powder and who more than once had ordered his girls to scrub the paint off their faces was gussied up with cosmetics, It made her laugh and cry. She ...”

“... really – come to mind. One is a courtroom in Uganda, when it was still a British protectorate. Joseph Kiwanuka, a battered but irrepressible editor, was being tried yet again for ‘criminal libel’ – the favourite charge used by the colonial authorities to deal with seditious newspapers. As the hearing concluded, the judge walked across to the ...”

“... four four-pounder guns, a merchantman bought by the Navy Board and fitted up with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, who was then guiding Kew towards its glorious future, as a floating conservatory to carry young breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the West Indies, there to provide cheap food for the African slaves. The ship, the voyage and the appointment were all ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs ...”

“... a single sheet was engraved, around 1658; it includes Somerset House in the south, Holborn in the north, Saint Martin’s Lane in the west and Lincoln’s Inn in the east. Hollar’s engraving of Leake’s post-fire survey (topped by a view of the fire from Southwark) gives another taste of what it might have been like. Maps document the way pride began to be ...”

“... of the whole Peninsula which American military forces aimed to achieve when they ventured north of the 38th Parallel. Moreover, we entered the Korean and Vietnam Wars without the kind of public debate that prepared Congressional and mass opinion for national sacrifice and made World Wars One and Two popular crusades. In this respect, however, Korea ...”

“... Joseph Johnson​ was fourteen when he arrived in London from Everton, Lancashire in 1753. He came to be apprenticed to George Keith, a bookseller in Gracechurch Street in the City. This was Hogarth’s London, a scene of dirty streets and dark alleys in which impressionable young people were met off the coach by an expectant crowd of brothel keepers, cutpurses and card sharps ...”