“... every dialect spoken from Lyon to Naples. He immediately set about getting himself expelled, and took ship for India in 1842 as an ensign in the East India Company army. Burton’s fame as an Orientalist rests chiefly on his 1880s translations. But he earned his spurs forty years earlier when, as Kennedy demonstrates, he became an ‘exemplary agent of the ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... and plans’ for a ‘gracious new neighbourhood of seemly working-class houses’, which he took round to his old friend Nye Bevan, ‘the newly appointed Minister of Health’ – post-1945, that is. However, towards the 1981 exhibition, the Marquise de la Fregonniére, as Mrs Gillson had by then become, referred me to London agents with whom her copy ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... whom arrived in 2005 when the Southern rebels of the SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, took power; as for the local population, the great majority are Karo – Mandari, Bari, Kakua, among others. Many of them were refugees in Uganda or Kenya during the war and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished ...”

“... Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer said. ‘Yeah, you should do.’ ‘I could set that up.’ The message the MP and press officer were trying to get across was not just that the Conservative Party has ...”

“... perverse that it sometimes seemed he was now simply missing the point of the original, as when he took the celebrated line ‘We must love one another or die’ to be a mistake, and preferred ‘We must love one another and die.’ Later he struck down the whole poem, as he did others, among them, it is still possible to argue, the finest of their ...”

“... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...”

“... day, William Pitt. Though he was an instinctive Whig, Canning’s ambition and admiration for Pitt took him over to the Tory side, and eventually into rivalry with Castlereagh. A reader could easily get lost as Hunt delves into the tedious politics of the age with only a woeful index (as in ‘Castlereagh, passim’) and without so much as a chronology or ...”

“... Bertie Ahern’s evidence soon took a melancholy turn when he appeared before the Mahon Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments after resigning as Ireland’s taoiseach. ‘I was out working, out doing my job as a political leader of this country, working my butt off,’ he said. ‘Not trying to make other than my own income and the few sums of money that I got from others ...”

“... for small reward he was teaching me geography in Edinburgh) and Robin Robertson, or the Irishman John F. Deane, or now the American Patty Crane. They were drawn by the small vocabulary, the short sentences, the largely transferable word-order, the language that seems to pay twenty shillings to the pound – darkness, stone, light, tree, cold. You feel the ...”

“... considered in isolation. If you were to ask someone with an interest in such matters what they took to be the earliest surviving work of sculpture, the chances are that they would say the astonishing limestone ‘Venus’ discovered a century ago on the banks of the Danube not far from the Austrian village of Willendorf. Tiny yet massive, the figure’s ...”

“... to commit to a team by the age of six, or eight at the latest. Unlike my friends whose fathers took them to watch Aldershot’s Fourth Division tussles on Saturday afternoons, I don’t remember watching a football match before the 1986 Mexico World Cup, when I was already nine and a half. That term at school was dominated by the build-up to the ...”

“... liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own ...”