“... To ensure its survival, and to avoid imposing an intolerable burden on the British population at home, the Empire was usually defended and policed by armies recruited from among each colony’s indigenous peoples. In South Africa, the Khoi-Khoi (Hottentots) were formed into the Cape Mounted Rifles to be used against the Xhosa (Kaffirs). In ...”

“... African migrants coming to the continent potential doctors, engineers, or revolutionaries in their home countries?’ And: ‘How different Africa would be if all that energy expended to leave the continent were turned inward.’ Youthful vigour would seem a slippery variable. But it is a spectre in Smith’s book: both the overproduction of African youth, and ...”

“... disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the ...”

“... likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three minutes ...”

“... haunted Boston, devouring and copying the treasures in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, even getting a little basic training at night from the New School of Design. Later he would promulgate more lies about having studied at the more prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, or graduated from Brown University. Daily life ...”

“... everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with ...”

“... He also found a new job as secretary of the United Liberal Club, which welcomed both Liberals and Home Rulers at a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss ...”

“... decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious ...”

“... bill of rights, part of the original policy behind the 1996 consultation paper Bringing Rights Home, which introduced the Human Rights Act. Now that the rights included in the European Convention on Human Rights have been brought home, is it time to start a family of new rights, and possibly of duties, to go with ...”

“... designed for China, or meant to explain China to the British. The strong views he had brought home on the China situation were unlikely to be pleasing to his superiors; he had no time for Chiang Kai-shek or his American supporters, and insisted on the evidence of his own eyes that the Communist armies had, at this stage anyway, been welcomed by the ...”

“... a hand-rolled edge’), ornithology (Cumberland Island, where the wedding took place, is home to ‘over three hundred species of birds’) and nomenclature (‘Gogo’ Ferguson, the family friend! Narsico, the exquisitely named dress designer!) … But none of the snippets meted out about Bessette Kennedy … appeared to provide the key to ...”

“... the man to be lodged until he recovers, the town thought to be a representation of the painter’s home, Bassano near Venice. So many paintings in galleries are populated by the beautiful and the perfectly proportioned that it’s a relief to find one of this date (mid-16th century) where the characters are so downright ordinary. These are not gods, or ...”

“... February. Good piece in this morning’s Guardian, a discussion between Will Self and Stewart Lee in which the latter describes the hostile reaction he sometimes has to face from audiences. At one point, ‘a guy got really angry. He said it wasn’t the audience’s fault they didn’t get what I was doing and I should be better at my job. I ...”

“... place for him, does Scottie’s vertigo speak to a deeper uneasiness? Scottie is played by James Stewart (which would usually be comforting). He was fifty when the film was made. A man of that age should be mature, but Scottie is unresolved. He went to nearby Stanford, he showed promise of bigger things, but now he’s a pensioned-off cop, with cracks in his ...”

“... simple to expose when they strayed on to the ground of defence and diplomacy, where he was most at home. The parochialism of their outlook was clearly visible through the eirenic rhapsodies of their characteristic domestic delusion, which they also extended to international affairs: the belief that economic rationality must somehow draw political rationality ...”