“... in the Far East? A return to America Firstism, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism along the North African littoral, political revolution in China? Maybe. What does seem clear, however, is that with the old two-bloc balance gone, it will be some time before a new three-bloc balance is achieved. The proximate new rulers of the world are the G7 states, but ...”

“... moral and physical welfare of the tropical traveller. No recent guide has surpassed the excellent John Hatt’s remarks on underwear in The Tropical Traveller (1982). Hatt insists that this ‘must be of pure cotton’ and urges a change of attitude, or perhaps a readjustment, for anyone foolish enough to hit the tropics wearing ‘the “jockey” style of ...”

“... The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put ...”

“... it bursts on the scene already mature. The sort of joint-stock venture capitalism that swept over north-western Europe in the 17th century lacked the refinements of a 21st-century public limited company. But its cast of characters, and the manic-depressive psychology of speculative investment, were there from the first day. We know that cast all too well. It ...”

“... the normalisation of relations with China. Two decades earlier, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had refused to shake Zhou Enlai’s hand: Kissinger not only did so but hailed him and Mao as great statesmen. Rather than claiming the right to project American power into the Communist world in the name of freedom, Kissinger promised to ...”

“... racist. Consciously or not, it also imitates far funnier and more successful examples, such as John Barth’s ‘Petition’ from Lost in the Funhouse, addressed to the King of Siam. The novel is not, contrary to confused assertions in the Indian press, another attempt at a form of Indian magical realism in the wake of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. No ...”

“... group had spent a couple of days in the Iraq Museum and then split into two units, one going north to Nineveh, Nimrud, Assur and Hatra, the other south to Babylon, Kish, Nippur, Uruk, Ur, Lagash. The Unesco team, however, was allowed only a limited stay in the country, was not permitted to go outside Baghdad, and its members had to live in tents in the ...”

“... many virtues of Ghosh’s book is its focus on Asia rather than the nations on either side of the North Atlantic. ‘Asia’s centrality to global warming rests, in the first instance, upon numbers,’ he writes. ‘The great majority of potential victims are in Asia.’ He describes the threats they face in stark terms: 125 million people in India and ...”

“... Provisionals, who believed that, without violence, it was impossible to defend Catholics in the North and keep up the struggle against the British with any effectiveness. Another issue was sectarianism. The old IRA leadership had long opposed it. Protestant and Catholic workers, they believed, should unite in a class struggle against the imperialist British ...”

“... house key to collect the electric charge, which in a thunderstorm in June 1752, in a field just north of Philadelphia, irrefutably showed the connection between lightning and electricity.Yet, perhaps because of his very variousness, Franklin’s biographers often dismiss these devices and discoveries as a string of hobbies, so many diversions from his ...”

“... they were not, as a rule, killed there. A cow typically began its life in Texas; was first herded north to the Plains; then herded eastwards (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for, however briefly, near a major centre of slaughter – almost always Chicago. Unlike the buffaloes, cattle were a marketable commodity. At the same time a ...”

“... by a colleague, as resembling ‘Hamlet’s indecisive younger brother’, and that, in the North of this country, ‘playing Hamlet’ has meant falling into a wild rage. It is certainly no less necessary to see him as a murderer than as a paragon. Shakespeare’s tragedies often concern the humanity of a murderer, who may see things that speak to a ...”

“... ancient allies and enemies yawning together on platforms at Boulder, Colorado, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. ‘Prisoners of the Press Conference’, as Ann Charters captions them. Explainers of what is gone, apologists for what never happened. Literary stocks busking to sustain their market value, justify the next complimentary, two-seat air ticket. Corso ...”

“... so it was natural enough for reviewers to notice the fact of his youth. The awful Christopher North patted the young poet on the head, praising ‘a promising plant’ while deploring an ‘infantile vanity’ (‘I forgave you all the blame,/Musty Christopher;/I could not forgive the praise,/Fusty Christopher,’ Tennyson wrote in a wounded ...”

“... and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian’; ‘No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted’; Gellner’s account is ‘Weberian ...”