“... its author and his buddy Netanyahu as a lonely pair of Churchills in a world beset by Iranian, North Korean, Russian and even Chinese Hitlers – the letter had already made him famous, even, in the eyes of the New Republic, a ‘dark horse’ contender for the presidency in 2016. Cotton comes from the town of Dardanelle, Arkansas, where his parents were ...”

“... highly-paid press officers, are prepared to divulge information. When Friends of the Earth asked North-West Water how much poisonous lead they had measured in their water, the quango haughtily refused to reply, complaining that they did not know where the questions were leading. I cite one example from a whole host of sealed lips I have encountered among ...”

“... Panic on the peninsula. Outrage in North Greenwich. The gas-holder, familiar to motorists skirting the perimeter fence of what is now the site of The Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames visible across the river from Beckton Alp to Parliament Hill. ‘A man said to have a slight Irish accent said: “This is the IRA ...”

“... violence started up again in Northern Ireland in 1968. Several of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the ...”

“... In June 1994, Bill Clinton came close to launching a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the last minute, Jimmy Carter got North Korea to agree to a complete freeze on activity at the Yongbyon complex, and a Framework Agreement was signed in October 1994 ...”

“... her arguments, and battling my way through just one of the notes on Marco Polo by the peerless Paul Pelliot – the one scholar this century who did know all the languages required to solve the riddles raised by his travels – I can understand her occasional note of irritation. But Pelliot was not necessarily more at home in a booklined study than dealing ...”

“... that would take him to Quito in Ecuador. Ngu was a teacher at a secondary school in the Anglophone north-western region of Cameroon, where there has been fighting since 2017 between separatists and troops loyal to the Francophone government of Paul Biya, who has run the country since 1982. The conflict has claimed around ...”

“... to get around – not among the Muslims, as you might think, but among the Catholic tribes of the north, whose favourite Sunday pastime was shooting members of families with whom they were at blood feud. The cover of The File on H shows three young peasants in their Sunday best – black from head to foot. They look threatening all right, but any photography ...”

“... Paul Nash​ is as close as we come, many think, to having a strong painter of the English landscape in the 20th century. The uncertainties built into the wording here are part of the point: Nash spent his working life trying to decide if ‘the English landscape’ was something that had an existence, as a value for art, beyond, say, 1918; and what the difference was, in landscape painting, between strength and histrionics; and whether remaining ‘a painter of the English landscape’, with all that followed in terms of a settling of accounts with Constable and Turner, and Blake and Palmer, and Crome and the watercolourists and Ford Madox Brown, was at all compatible with being a painter ‘in the 20th century ...”

“... politician and Baptist minister born into a slave-holding family in the Confederate state of North Carolina three years into the Civil War, was enraged by the success of a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His response was to write a quasi-autobiographical novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902), which was both a ...”

“... of Whig propaganda, it was the creed of yesterday’s men: ‘the broken-down gentry of the North’, ‘the depressed peasantry of the South-West’, ‘the cantankerous clergy of Oxford and Cambridge’. It was no surprise to Plumb that the main strength of the Jacobite movement derived from ‘the tribal ferocity’ of the Scottish Highlands ...”

“... and subjugate other peoples – depends on freedom of the seas. All of American history – North, Central and South American history – has been inevitably tied up with those words, “freedom of the seas”.’ Bosco is concerned that the idea of that freedom is vanishing. Russia is planting flags on the bottom of the Atlantic, China is harassing ...”

“... of government expenditure in 1951 to 43 per cent in 1955. The second Churchill Administration, in Paul Addison’s words, was one of ‘Tory wets, for whom social harmony was a higher priority than economic sufficiency. The Prime Minister himself was soaking wet.’ Yet the very breadth of the consensus indicated the limited nature of the social ...”

“... more. The remedies proposed recently by a top-level team of financiers including Shijuro Ogata and Paul Volcker should also be implemented – among them, interest penalties on those countries that pay late. Finally, it should be made possible for individuals around the world to contribute to other UN bodies besides Unicef. This wouldn’t be easy, but various ...”

“... of US forces from the peninsula. But for that, the recent angry artillery exchanges between North and South Korea might have led to a nuclear war. According to Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, in a report for the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, in 2009 the US possessed between 9400 and 10,400 nuclear ...”