“... by the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, the only African country to withstand the Scramble, the term took on a powerful political dimension. Ethiopian movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and John Chilembwe’s Nyasaland rising of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and ...”

“... debris. T.C. Boyle is part East Coast acerbic, part Californian flower-guru. In youth, he took the Burroughs-tour from a childhood in the ‘vestigial woods of suburban Westchester’, through fixations on Huxley, Orwell, Salinger and Kerouac, into drop-out drug addiction and subsequently dragged himself out of smack-bohemia, settling into a PhD in ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... separatist territory, Abkhazia. The situation in South Ossetia remained static until Saakashvili took power in 2004. A key part of his appeal, alongside his promises to fight corruption and align Georgia with the West, was his promise to restore the country’s territorial integrity. (In this respect, there is a similarity between him and Putin; there were ...”

“... material remains, and there were, surprisingly perhaps, a number of antiquaries at Waterloo. They took careful note of the lie of the land as well as the debris on the surface. Walter Scott was there, on his first trip abroad. By August, when he arrived, the site was a tourist attraction doing a roaring trade. ‘Men, women and children rushed out upon ...”

“... happen to our mothers, some things happen to us, but it all happens to us.’ (When she later took the set designer Isamu Noguchi to look at Giacometti’s matchstick sculpture, The Palace at 4 a.m., she was showing him the primal dream of a place. This was the ‘quality of space’, she said, that she wanted for Appalachian Spring. Noguchi gave it to ...”

“... Disarmament and the early British anti-apartheid movement.Over the Easter weekend of 1961 we took part in the CND march from the Atomic Weapons Research Centre at Aldermaston to London. The march, which had first taken place three years earlier, was already becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to ...”

“... so, off and on, he raced round the coalfields of those two counties (and of Lancashire, where he took a new job for the miners in 1845), arguing, injuncting, adjourning for accused miners and their families. ‘We resisted,’ he explained, ‘every act of repression, even those we were sure of losing.’ He lost most of them. But he won some. In the early ...”

“... carried on, with his awful quasi-American evangelical rallies, as though people couldn’t think. John Hewson, whose like I trust we shall never see again in this arena, was brought up a Baptist – he’s still got that pious look – and studied postgraduate economics in the USA. Later he left the wife who’d typed his thesis and raised the kids, telling ...”

“... with three exceptions, come to a vividly described and very far from delightful end in which he took no pleasure at all.Up until about this time Raban seems to have found little to suit his purpose; but once sea-bathing, seaside holidays, Romanticism and sailing for pleasure, usually in small boats, were firmly established, a great wealth or at least a ...”

“... as ‘a symbol of American cultural imperialism’. In December 1982, the West German Government took the unprecedented step of issuing a communiqué to the effect that Dallas did not pose a fundamental threat to the German family. Opposition MPs were not satisfied. With its complete egoism, commercialism and debasement of human relationships, the series had ...”

“... were, in art and life, part of Capa’s style. Whelan demythologises Capa without being sour. John Hersey wrote that ‘despite all his inventions and postures Capa has somewhere at his centre a reality. This is his talent’ – and described that talent as you might an actor’s or a gambler’s. Perhaps the wars he covered encouraged that kind of ...”

“... to that honour, consequence and independence, which European laws studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme libre could be woman.’ On the other hand, some scholars (few of whom ...”

“... Deep South. My first job in New York was on the copy desk at a celebrity weekly where I put in and took out commas and wrote the occasional headline: ‘It’s 2 a.m. in Hollywood – Where Are the Bush Twins?’ The woman who sat behind me and wrote in her free time about female boxers today raises rabbits and sells them for meat somewhere in the Great Lakes ...”

“... were excitedly vulnerable to the charms of fame and what came with it, and the men – who, as John Peel (not obviously an abusive monster) said, ‘didn’t ask for ID’ – took their tribute in sexual encounters without concerning themselves with the age of those they were exploiting. Another tweet caught my ...”