“... Romans retreated from Britain and covered the area now bordered by Long Acre and Kingsway to the north. The authors suggest that superstition might have led the Anglo-Saxons to build outside the old Roman walls: did they imagine ghosts as they ‘surveyed from afar the colossal wreck, boundless and bare, of the Roman amphitheatre, and of the collapsed ...”

“... temporarily garrisoned by the Chinese and British armies. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang took the North and the British under General Gracey occupied the South. In a little known and not very creditable episode, Gracey’s men released the Japanese soldiers and used them to hold down the locals until the French returned. I once asked Vietnam’s foreign ...”

“... damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told. John Wayne’s film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn’t tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on – indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and ...”

“... In 1738 John Rocque, a Frenchman, began his survey of London. His map (engraved by John Pine) covers an area from Marylebone and Chelsea in the west to Stepney and Deptford in the east. It was finally published in 1747. Pasted together, its 24 sheets measure 13 x 6 ½ feet – that is how it is shown in the exhibition London 1753 at the British Museum until 23 November ...”

“... the lead shot in game killed by guns. On the other hand and the other side of the country, one of North America’s showiest and most famously extinct birds, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, reappeared in 2004 and was publicly announced to still exist after all in the spring of 2005, amid a media circus, scientists’ tears, a lot of astonishment and rapture, and ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... aristocracy who, fleeing inner-city squalor, were seeking to build a new residential area north of Oxford Street. Only a generation later Macaulay, speaking on the Reform Bill, enthused over ‘that immense city which lies to the north of Great Russell Street and Oxford Street, a city superior in size and in ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale ...”

“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... of such nationalists: but it is the occasional gringo heretic – like the muckraking journalist John Kenneth Turner who, in 1909, blew the whistle on Mexican neo-slavery, alleging that his compatriots had ‘transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the US’ – who has often made the biggest impact. Such auto-critiques carry special weight; they exude ...”

“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”

“... They’ll never pull it off, people said. Too little time, too little money, obstruction from the North … The April 2010 elections – both presidential and local – had gone poorly, ‘highly chaotic, non-transparent, and vulnerable to electoral manipulation’, as the international observers from the Carter Center declared ...”

“... natives who have profitably studied in Britain will be found at leading departments everywhere in North America and Australasia. British universities still enjoy a uniquely high degree of what Halsey calls ‘commensality’: that is, academic people sharing the same table and talking to each other across departmental and rank lines. This is partly a function ...”