“... what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size). As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent ...”

“... of a lost world before civilisation. Like near contemporaries such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, his was a work of synthesis, densely sourced and annotated but sweepingly Romantic in style and scope. It reflected his own Orthodox Christian background, privileging descriptions of heavenward journeys and finding echoes of the shaman in the Christian ...”

“... People would ring the doorbell to ask about Stevenson, and they still do. John remembers James Pope Hennessy turning up when he was writing his book about RLS. ‘He was busy turning down a knighthood at the time,’ Mr Macfie said. ‘And I think they were keen to give it to him in thanks for all he hadn’t written about Queen Mary.’ Macfie’s ...”

“... bin Laden’s hideout under torture. ‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... the maelstrom of London life, which Cath undertakes in the company of two admirable young friends, James and Boy William. Cast adrift in the capital, these three innocents move from milieu to milieu as rapidly as one of Dickens’s protagonists. To call both them and the types they run up against ‘Dickensian’ is indeed to acknowledge David Cook’s ...”

“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... took on a bet with his superior at the West End Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System, Harry Campbell, who doubted that he could find a sexual trauma lurking behind a ten-year-old girl’s seemingly paralysed arm. He won the bet – the girl’s arm had become paralysed after she’d used it to spurn a boy’s sexual advances – but he was sacked after ...”

“... is now more than half the market valuation of the company – GM, US Steel, Colgate-Palmolive, Campbell Soup, Lucent, Goodyear, Marconi, ICI and BT. Pension deficits eat away the value of a company’s stock, and funds which might have been available for investment have to be used to reduce the deficit. At companies such as IBM, Verizon and Corus, jobs ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... of incurring the enmity of her mother Lady Dalkeith, later Lady Greenwich, one of the unruly Campbell connection and a ‘wicked witch’, according to Louisa Stuart, herself a relative of the witch on her father’s side. There are commentators who have detected as implausible, in Richardson’s novel, not so much its postal dimension, the ‘ready ...”

“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... Willem de Kooning had a show ‘that sold out on its first day and netted $150,000’. The artist James Rosenquist caught a glimpse of Johns around this time: ‘One winter morning I walked out of my building, and along came this four-door Jaguar sedan. At the wheel was Jasper … With his first money he’d bought a coat and a Jaguar … I was happy to see a ...”