“... seal-fur sporran, had I been able (aged nine) to find out from such a book as this latest work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bloom. On the other hand, for me Eros lies quiet at no season. Nay rather, like a Thracian north wind ablaze with lightning, rushing from Aphrodite accompanied by parching madnesses, black, unastonishable, powerfully, right up from the bottom of my feet [it] shakes my whole breathing being. [fr. 286 as ‘Woman’s Constancy’ by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... extend from the uranium mines of Western Australia to missile warheads targeted across the North Pole. They influence, and are influenced by, the price of sugar in Brazil and the political status of the Golan Heights. They are prime movers of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the Caucasus have had no effect. He permitted himself to be bounced into sending troops into North Ossetia to keep that Russian autonomous republic within the bounds of the constitution, then withdrew them 24 hours later with nothing achieved except that the hand of the new ruler, General Dudaev, had been strengthened. He has been unable to stop ...”

“... modernism than to attempt to show how the Industrial Revolution had shaped the environment of the North of England (which I had barely visited then). I had friends from Lancashire who were clearly scornful of my blinkered metropolitanism, but I was just as scornful of their parochialism. Lowry was, after all, a local painter – as though the same weren’t ...”

“... odd terminology of the LT billboard, ‘a body on the line’. And her father comes down from the North to tell her that he is remarrying and disowning her. Maggie’s past is disclosed in mournful flashbacks: it contains a pregnancy, a suicide attempt, a VD scare, an oafish seduction by the president of the ‘fuck of the month club’. Not much fun, as the ...”

“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”