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“... by a converse conquest of discourse is deliciously Greenblattian. But in Marvellous Possessions Stephen Greenblatt is dealing with the Spanish conquest of the New World. This time the conqueror’s assurance of superiority is brutally uniform: a superiority of arms, together with a superiority of spirit, consisting in the possession of the True ...”

“... pedagogy. No such contradictions assail the editors of the Longman Exam Guides, who preface Martin Stephen’s English Literature* with the observation that ‘much has been said in recent years about declining standards and disappointing exam results. While this may be somewhat exaggerated, examiners are well aware that the performance of many candidates ...”

“... to know. He had met Denis Thatcher and Mark at an arms fair. He had several times come across Stephen Tipping, Mark’s ambitious and thrusting partner in the defence business. No establishment door was shut to him. Naturally, James was very right-wing. He’d been a disciple, he still boasts, of George Kennedy Young, an MI6 agent who became deputy ...”

“... her sights on a man who had spent much of his life at court under her father’s guidance: Francis Stephen, who was nine years her senior and inherited the small duchy of Lorraine in 1729. He was persuaded – with some difficulty – to renounce his hereditary rights and the provincial charms of Nancy and Lunéville. In ...”

“... produce.’ All this makes it very difficult to isolate what exactly it was that turned a small minority of bourgeois men into Freikorps thugs, or even what made a rather larger number of them fascists. Theweleit’s tendency to expand the application of his analysis further and further, his broad, at times seemingly limitless concept of fascism, his ...”

“... in 1899, he split his time between the rich sporting set and the intellectuals, befriending Thoby Stephen, who similarly bridged the two, and many of those who would come to form the Bloomsbury Group. (Bell chased Thoby’s sister Vanessa for years; she agreed to marry him in 1906, on the day of Thoby’s funeral: he caught typhoid while on holiday in Greece ...”

“... central Middle Ages. Unlike other heretics (but like the Catholics), Cathars were divided into a small leadership of celibates who preached and performed rituals, and a very much larger group of believers. Strictly speaking, the only true Cathars were those in the first category: they had undergone a ritual, the consolamentum, that released the spirit from ...”

“... anything better than Yeats’s sickening ‘dream of the noble and the beggarman’. He hated the small towns, with their shopkeepers, as Yeats wrote, ‘fumbling in a greasy till’. The truth is that Synge was never really interested in political issues. As a young man, he much preferred to traipse around Europe, playing his fiddle, enjoying the seasons and ...”

“... future. Occasionally there was the odd piece that came to life in spite of it all. I recall a small lithograph (I think it was) where a cool jet of irrigation water arched across the deep dark green of an upland valley, while the sun shone yellow on a plain far below, sparkling with pylons. Two conflicting trends could be seen in the ...”

“... all that interested in commercial success, but they were innovative and intriguing, and attracted small, very devoted followings. I once met two students from Nijmegen who had come on a pilgrimage to Manchester because they loved The Fall. They flicked through my record collection and asked me about the band’s frontman, Mark E. Smith, and his ...”

“... killed at Inkerman or Balaclava, rather than on the Somme, was, in statistical terms, extremely small. But that of course is just the oddity of history, and of the consciousness in which it resides at any given moment. Paul Scott would never have made such an apparent faux pas; his sense of historical timing is always quietly immaculate. But Farrell’s ...”

“... develop, and to earn some of the wealth that industrialised nations now possess. Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks’s book, the first attempt in recent years to examine African views of China, makes clear that there is hunger in Africa for a new partner. Though they are cautious about the negative impact of China’s rise, and wary of the way China treats its ...”

“... the defeated Dixie soldiers who took refuge in Latin America after the war and started small slave colonies. Their Brazilian descendants honour them with fancy-dress pageants.The first signs of a new American dispensation came with Woodrow Wilson, who considered Central America a field for democratic tutelage, with interventions between 1913 and ...”

“... this century the body of statute law has broken the surface at many points, forming sometimes small islands – such as the unnecessary but minor incursion of the legislature into the judge-made law of judicial review – and sometimes great land-masses like the modern law of real property, supplanting the common law and equity, or whole continents of ...”

“... grateful, for she looked after the widowed Mansfield in his last years, and he left her a small legacy to add to the large one from her father. After his death Dido married, had three sons, and died in her early forties. She is sensitively portrayed in the recently released film Belle, which goes to great lengths to recreate time and place (much of it ...”