“... by scholars whose main source was the Bible. (The evangelical adventurer and self-publicist John MacGregor found this a problem on a canoe trip down the Jordan in 1868.) Aspirant surveyors quickly discovered that they needed the co-operation of local tribal leaders, some of whom collaborated in the hope that it would encourage a British force to invade ...”

“... insisted that Georgia was changing. Thanks to the reverse migration of Black people from the North, she noted, the Black population was now a third of the electorate; Georgia also had an increasing number of Latino and Asian voters who, along with liberal whites, could form a Democratic majority. In 2018 she came close to winning the gubernatorial ...”

“... and others associated with the Brownings; and Athlone, who hold the distribution rights outside North America, are no longer the University of London Press. Without generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities in America the project could not have continued. The NEH can, for once, be assured without qualification that its money is being ...”

“... memorialist of Ireland’s ancient past, from Crofton Croker to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde, John O’Donovan, Eugene Curry and a host of others has issued this same warning. What you see now will soon be visible no more; what you see now is only the remnant of what once was. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. All traditional cultures ...”

“... War (Walzer endorses this opposition without offering any justification) and for his criticism of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann for writing pro-war propaganda. He is also (like all those up to this point in the rankings) considered methodologically sound by Walzer: ‘studying and clarifying the ideas of American democracy’ was, Bourne said, the ...”

“... timing, that fuelled my admiration. There can have been nothing more absurd to the audience of North London middle-class parents and schoolboys than my production.My mother was a Jewish New Yorker, and one was as likely to come across Mort Sahl, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber dotted around the family home as H.B. Morton or Wodehouse. Despite ...”

“... the past twenty years a particularly virulent and specifically American component as settlers from North America have come to Israel bringing as their contribution a deeply typical combination of ideological heedlessness and indiscriminate violence. Baruch Goldstein is not a particularly unusual case: a man steeped in long-distance fantasies of a Jewish ...”

“... out, ‘the fastest growing group of towns was not London and the industrial aggregations of the North and Midlands but watering places and holiday resorts.’ The one novelist in the period this reminds me of is Thomas Hardy, especially in The Mayor of Casterbridge. That novel is full of improvised ceremonies, either wholly concocted or adapted from some ...”

“... peace and destroying the good order of the community.’ This was in 1771. Five years later Lord North, who, though not perhaps a figure of the most shining merit, had certainly been ‘soiled’ by much journalistic obloquy, increased the tax on paper by 50 and on advertisements by 100 per cent. Pitt put it up even more. In the first half of the 19th ...”

“... after which a framing story loops back towards the book’s first sentence. Along with the Being John Malkovich effect that Hemon gets by surrounding Pronek with other versions of himself, all this just about dovetails with his thematic concerns. A sense of ‘stale disreality’ with regard to personal identity afflicts all his displaced characters sooner ...”

“... direct visitors to the site of Rip Van Winkle’s cottage, and recently there was a move to rename North Tarrytown ‘Sleepy Hollow’ – an idea that seemed authentic to everyone except the people who lived there. In the same myth-making spirit, Maxwell Anderson’s play places a chorus of ghosts on High Tor. His ancient Indian (the last of his ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother ...”

“... the end, however, he decided to build his own palace on a plot of land some twenty blocks further north on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Builders broke ground on the property in 1912, the same year Frick acquired what has become one of the most celebrated works in the collection: Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More. (In due ...”

“... book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror ...”

“... quietly suggested, ‘They grow into dogs, I expect, and marry bitches.’ White’s war in the North African desert was dreary on the whole, but it took him to Alexandria where, in July 1941, he met Manoly Lascaris, ‘this small Greek of immense moral strength, who became the central mandala of my life’s hitherto messy design’. Forty years later they ...”