“... takes on a particularly graphic edge when you’re reading Robertson. Robertson was born on the north-east coast of Scotland. He can write wonderfully about Scottish coasts and myths, and is temperamentally a northern island or isthmus dweller. In that respect he’s like John Burnside, to whom he dedicated his best poem so far, ‘At Roane Head’ (LRB, 14 ...”

“... with the arid coastal areas near Luanda, in Angola, and the savannahs of the plateau further north. These deep-rooted connections meant that slaving wars in one area influenced the political stability of the rest of the region. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, Kongo and Ndongo – the kingdom at the heart of what is now Angola – fractured into ...”

“... On 16 August 1960, a US air force captain called Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a balloon. The balloon was 102,800 feet above the Earth. It would be an exaggeration to say that Kittinger jumped out of a balloon in space, as he’s sometimes said to have done, but there’s no denying that his jump was, in layman’s terms, seriously freaking high ...”

“... who discovered the beavers on an expedition canoeing through Canada in a vain attempt to find a north-west passage to China. A great pleasure of the book lies in the several stories like this that Brook tells. Here is a passage describing Champlain facing down some Mohawk warriors: There had been four lead balls in the chamber of Champlain’s arquebus. At ...”

“... appear as many multi­colour­ed shorelines woven into an undul­ating whole. A key floats in the North Sea (mark­ed here as ‘The German Ocean’), east of the Humber, displaying a cross-section of strata. Smith’s Strata Identified by Organised Fossils (1816) introduced his principle of faunal succession, which posits that the fossil types present in ...”

“... figureheads. HMS Clown (1856) was adorned with a stylised representation of the Regency comedian Joseph Grimaldi, whose catchphrase (‘Here we are again!’) was carved on a wooden banner wound around his polka-dotted legs. Merchant ship owners could name their vessels however they liked and drew on an astonishing range of references for their ...”

“... in the next few months, I found myself at another Meeting of the Waters, on the Outer Banks, off North Carolina, and near yet another, at Springbrook, in a temperate Queensland rainforest, seven miles from where I was staying, along a leech-infested path. I gave that one a miss. I had already collected more than a hundred places which were known, or had once ...”

“... the US. A new spirit of patriotism was stirring as Japan continued its creeping aggression in the north. Army recruits were given lectures on ‘The Coming Sino-Japanese War’ and ‘How to Make Sacrifices’. Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Children at a school in Jiangsu who were too poor to buy their textbooks complained that they would have to ...”

“... But the work proceeded, not only in English, but across the globe. A French translation by Joseph Roy (which Marx himself had supervised and revised) had been published between 1872 and 1875.The German word for translation, übertragen, implies that we can simply ‘carry over’ meaning from one language to another. But no two meanings are wholly ...”

“... with astonishment seeing the Pater kneel down to put Barbara’s boots on. Though her own father, Joseph Parkes, held advanced opinions, a scene of that kind would be inconceivable in her family. Ben showed his daughter that it was perfectly possible to thrive without conforming, and that a woman could claim her own space in the scheme of things. Just as ...”

“... homeless, both the half-million refugees expelled from Palestine and the internal exiles driven north by the Israeli-Palestinian war, inspired dissidence. The revolutionary-minded sought not a utopian future so much as a return to an idealised past before French colonial disfigurement and Israel’s seizure of Palestine.Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims and Druze ...”

“... Miss Yonge’s ‘The Mother’s Book’, Longfellow’s ‘Discovery of the North Cape’ and Cowper’s ‘On the Receipt of his Mother’s Picture’. ‘The Deserted Village’ was added for the higher standards in 1892. Object lessons included plum pudding, Saint George and the Dragon, posting a letter and the Union Jack. The school ...”

“... acts, and whose character is shrouded by an almost painful formality? It’s no surprise that Joseph Ellis should now venture an answer to this question, having already produced biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as a book about the 1790s, Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Like many Americans, George Washington ...”

“... was ‘Rats on the Waterfront’, the mother of all New York rat pieces, by the great reporter Joseph Mitchell: The brown rat is hostile to other kinds; it usually attacks them on sight. It kills them by biting their throats or by clawing them to pieces, and, if hungry, it eats them … All rats are vandals, but the brown is the most ruthless … Now and ...”

“... The woods around London offered some curious sights in the 1840s. To the north in Epping Forest the infant William Morris could be seen riding out in a toy suit of armour, while down in Surrey, in the Tillingbourne Valley, little Gertrude Jekyll was learning to make gunpowder. In the event it was Morris who became the political revolutionary and Gertrude Jekyll who withdrew into a secluded world of romance in the house and garden she created at Munstead Wood ...”