“... an evocative portrait of the now forgotten city that emerged from World War Two. In the words of John Gunther, New York in 1945 was ‘incomparably the greatest manufacturing town on earth’, a city of garment, printing, electronics and many other small firms producing specialised goods. It was also America’s largest port, handling one-third of the ...”

“... bicycle tour of France has something of all of these about it. Like Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Space (1997), which pursues the ‘problem of England’ through the eyes of an unseen narrator travelling in the spirit of Daniel Defoe along paths since obstructed by nuclear power stations and motorways, Robb covers French space and time ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... has been marked by a belligerent stance towards opponents, whether at home or abroad – as Mary Robinson discovered when she dared to criticise his Government for human-rights violations in Chechnya. His brutal suppression of that independence movement and his renouncing of the no-first-strike principle of Russian nuclear strategy provided clear indications ...”

“... and pelted with bags of soot, and men occasionally take their pleasure with donkeys. Not much Mary Robinson there. The novel includes a portrayal of a Northern Irish Free Presbyterian, done magnificently from the inside (Healy lives in County Sligo, which is within hailing distance of the North) but a good deal more cold-eyed than anything one would expect to ...”

“... nation; a few years ago this provoked the almost comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over ...”

“... disposable trash but high-end productions for fashionable consumers. By comparison, typo-strewn Robinson Crusoe and cramped, crowded Pamela start to look downmarket. But King’s most brilliant recoveries – and this book is full of them – were made on the screen. Before digitisation a few years back, no scholar poring over the Burney Newspaper ...”

“... are alleged to belong to the ancient Sabean sect whose worshippers give primacy as a prophet to John the Baptist. Depending on the nature of what they are asked to do, I’m told, witches and sorcerers charge at least $400 for a spell or a curse, though the better-known ones can command up to $6000. Spells relate to marriage, love, divorce, good health, job ...”

“... but a guy liked to have good hair. Then some magic descended on him, and the magician was John Huston, who wrote the script for High Sierra (1941). It’s the story of a veteran gangster, Roy Earle, who wants peace and a new life. But as he comes out of prison, the girl he likes dumps him and he’s on the hook for one more job. Huston saw him ...”

“... what the historian J.A. Froude called a ‘Pan Anglo-Saxon festival’. The imperial historian Sir John Seeley is remembered for having floated the idea that the British Empire had been acquired in ‘a fit of absence of mind’. There was no absent-mindedness about his determination that any empire federation should exclude the Indians who were ‘of alien ...”

“... back out into space. The existence of the effect was first posited in 1859 by the Irish scientist John Tyndall, who said that without the greenhouse effect ‘the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost’. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius added to ...”

“... it had been destroyed.As it turned out, however, there was much more to come. In the late 1970s, John Marks, a journalist who specialised in intelligence matters, filed a Freedom of Information request that uncovered a trove of 16,000 documents, most of which hadn’t been sent for shredding because they were filed as financial records. In the course of ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”

“... Brisbane went down as good for nothing. Misleading information could wreck a business. In 1848, John Beardsley sued the Mercantile Agency for slander in a case that lasted 23 years, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and undercuts American privacy rights to this day. The story began with a routine entry: Beardsley’s wife was about to file for ...”

“... as the last selection in his book. Watten’s essay concludes with a discussion of the poem by Kit Robinson, ‘In the American Tree’, which gave Silliman the title for his anthology. Drawing a useful comparison between Robinson’s poem and a Surrealist text by Breton, Watten distinguishes the different ways in which ...”