“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”

“... but he was not at first given any credit for the design. The plan is admirably clear, with tall north-facing studios placed along spinal corridors. The huge windows that light these studios may well have been inspired by those at Montacute in Somerset, the Elizabethan country house which Mackintosh had sketched. As for other details, architectural ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... is bad enough. But according to one of the world’s most influential climate scientists, John Schellnhuber, ‘the difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.’ Thanks to the global paralysis since 1992, the ‘window of opportunity’ for reducing emissions fast enough to avoid this scenario is starting to look more like a crack ...”

“... for ‘English’ measures exaggerates the social and economic homogeneity of England – the North of England has more in common with Scotland than with the Home Counties. Besides, the creation of a Parliament where some MPs can’t vote on much of the legislation that comes before it turns those MPs, as Gordon Brown has pointed out, into second-class ...”

“... enlarging Brazilian territory. But da Cunha says this overlooks the fact that the flow continues north, ‘a river without banks’ reaching as far as the Carolinas: In those places the Brazilian is a stranger, a foreigner. Yet he is treading upon Brazilian soil … The irony of a country without land counterposes itself to another irony, more rudely ...”

“... life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks took their pleasures where they could find them. For the regular soldiers this usually meant the brothels of Kingston. On return to camp they were required to attend the grandly named Prophylactic Ablution Centre. Those who failed to ...”

“... fate is here dismissed in a sentence: ‘the great invasion fleet … foundered uselessly in the North Sea.’ No mention of Drake and the fireships, let alone the bowls on Plymouth Hoe. Nor is there a word about the further Armadas that Philip sent against England in 1596 and 1597, nor about Drake’s disastrous counter-Armada to La Coruña in 1589, which ...”

“... Japanese imperialism. After the Second World War Ajinomoto Co. established footholds in Europe and North America, though in the US it immediately faced home-grown competition from an identical flavouring cooked up by the International Minerals & Chemical Corporation of Chicago, unleashed under the slogan ‘Ac’cent makes food flavours sing.’By now ...”

“... formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s rights activists and working-class representatives, sharing a platform with William Morris. He supported improving the lives of labouring Britons, while educating his audiences ...”

“... don’t know how to talk to women and wish they knew bigger words. Dacre’s spiritual mentor was John Junor of the Sunday Express, a man who thought that men who drink white wine are ‘poofters’ and believed, according to the paper’s literary editor Graham Lord, ‘that Aids was a fair punishment for buggery’. According to a memoir written by ...”

“... the weekend Britain left the EU. It was raining, and a cold, hard breeze was blowing in from the North Sea. At Butlin’s, in a huge tent filled with burger bars and dayglo cocktails, the Brexiteers were dancing to 1980s pop music and getting excited. A number of drunk men were dressed as St George, wearing England flags and Crusader helmets. Eyes ...”

“... itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful businessman. His mother, Saly, ran the two family homes. She gave him the nickname Izu, which he went on to adopt as his nom de guerre. Isou’s first, ongoing fight was with his father, and he found an ...”

“... life. The sharp decline of hitchhiking in the 1990s may have been informed by the geographer John Adams’s concept of the ‘risk thermostat’, one implication of which is that people’s perception of danger often differs wildly from statistical reality. The horror stories, in other words, were taking the place of less obvious underlying ...”

“... Danzig, Natalia Ginzburg’s divided Italy, Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the ...”