“... what Alford calls ‘formidable ambition and startling ignorance’, an expedition to find the north-east passage set off in 1553, armed with a letter from the king extolling the universal benefits of a shared treasury of the high seas. The mariners were briefed on how to manage alien encounters: the native should be treated warily yet courteously and ...”

“... It was completed some time after 1607 and stands in the sacristy of a church in Bassano Romano, north of Rome. Visitors can compare it with a full-size cast of the statue Michelangelo made from the second block, the original being in the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Michelangelo normally worked from the front of a block and probably hadn’t ...”

“... from the newly occupied territories.Mahmoud’s family came from Qastina, a village about 25 miles north of Gaza City in Mandate Palestine. His father, whose parents died when he was young, had been raised by an aunt in the port city of Yaffa, where he remained until 1948, when the family were driven off their property by Zionist militias, and taken by boat to ...”

“... and for the same reason: their attractions are calculated by eyes which are neither Roman nor North African. One tends to see what one knows and Gérôme knew what a pretty French girl looked like. He took great pains with the tiles, marble, robes, baths and so on, but suggesting that you know just what things look like physically (although I am not sure ...”

“... to do with them, fearing them as she has been taught to do. She’s hoping to run far enough north that she finds the French, who may be ‘papists’ but at least are not ‘heathens’. This tiny, starved body running through the woods takes on allegorical proportions. She is the servant who runs from the cruel master; the woman who runs from the man ...”

“... of many men, including her husband, at the barracks on the Viale Giulio Cesare in Prati, a quarter north of the Vatican. Laura Lombardo Radice, a central figure of the communist resistance and the leading light of this and several other protests during the occupation, said she saw Gullace rush towards her husband, who was standing on the other side of the ...”

“... secretary of state for energy in the late 1970s, was that Britain should use its tax revenue from North Sea oil to build up a sovereign wealth fund. Norway did this, and has become one of the richest countries in the world; Benn’s idea was not adopted. The advocacy of greater democracy in these pieces often has a strong populist flavour, with frequent ...”

“... about the nature of money, we need to travel to the Pacific Ocean. In Micronesia, about 1800 miles north of the eastern corner of Australia, there’s a group of islands called Yap. It has a population of 11,000 and is largely unvisited except by divers, but it’s a very popular place with economists talking about the nature of money, starting with a ...”

“... under arms: virtually the entire military-age population of the South and a good proportion of the North as well. Very large armies – sometimes 100,000 to a side – fought scores of deadly pitched battles and hundreds of smaller ones in which casualty rates were routinely 20-25 per cent: 620,000 men died; cities were bombed and burned to the ...”

“... it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any ...”

“... war itself often had little impact. When in July 1943, after the Allies had driven the Axis out of North Africa and crossed the Mediterranean, Channon said to Laura Corrigan, ‘Isn’t it wonderful about Sicily?’ she replied: ‘Sicily who?’One difference​ between the two diaries is particularly striking: Nicolson writes about people with almost ...”

“... Do trees have rights? Radical conservationists who oppose the logging of redwoods in the American North-West, or the destruction of the tropical rain forests, sometimes claim that they do. The forests, they say, have been here much longer than we have, and have as much right to exist as the rapacious human species that is destroying them ...”

“... subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two months later, in Thermidor, the politically nimble Barère voted to condemn Robespierre to death, but that is another story). He called ...”

“... 1971. Lebanese Christians massacred even more between 1975 and 1982. Syria killed Palestinians in north Lebanon in 1983, and the Shi‘ite Muslim Amal militia attacked them in Beirut in 1986. The worst Israeli massacre of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, at Deir Yassin, left 350 Palestinian civilians dead – ‘deliberately massacred in cold blood’, as the Red ...”

“... goods they had never been blessed with before. In the task of purifying the urban South, the North must have risked some infection from its impurities. He saw Hanoi too, and felt that the North was, though victorious, exhausted. He saw something both of the Vietnamese entering Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge, and the ...”