“... not have felt at sea in pondering such vicissitudes. She was the daughter of Lord Bute, another North British prime minister, whose retreat to Luton Hoo, in the sourness of political defeat, helped to embitter her youth. Her choice of a husband was cancelled by her father, and the friends she made outside the family circle were dearer to her than those ...”

“... savage’. The first encounter between Greek urban colonists and Scythian nomads took place on the north shore of the Black Sea from the seventh or sixth century BC. At first, as Herodotus suggests, the Greeks registered this difference as amazing and unfamiliar, but did not express it in terms of human ‘value’. It was the Athenian playwrights during the ...”

“... to Arabs. ‘He joked about the Golani Brigade, the infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemeni Jews. “They’re OK as long as they are led by white officers,” he grinned.’ For all his braggadocio, ‘Ben Nitay’ was still floundering well into the 1970s. He gave occasional speeches in the Boston area on behalf of the Israeli ...”

“... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...”

“... my wife, lived with her parents on Friston Estate, a farm 17 miles beyond Kitale, at the extreme north-western limit of the White Highlands of Kenya, the Trans-Nzoia. The farm was only four or five miles from the ridge which formed the border of the tribal homeland of the Suk, more properly called Pokot, a Southern Nilotic pastoral people. Europeans were not ...”

“... of sponsoring terrorism may not be sufficient to win public support for action. On 6 May 2002, John Bolton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, filled the gap by accusing Syria of developing chemical and biological weapons and acquiring hundreds of Scud missiles. He warned that Damascus was a step away from ...”

“... House, Sydney already had what Australians hoped was a world-famous Bridge, endlessly repainted in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to ...”

“... had arranged to spend the night at Ladispoli, a small seaside town twenty kilometres or so to the north, from where we could make an early start for Todi the following morning. Ladispoli is a modern town from what little we can see of it in the dark, and we drive down straight suburban streets lined with shuttered two-storey villas, looking for our ...”

“... nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ...”

“... of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and prospered. The story that these details suggest, of exile and nostalgia, is more pertinent than the data of Agee’s education, employment, marriages. He enjoyed wide recognition and often enough he finished his projects. Yet the things he ...”

“... is used for ‘he’ and ‘she’, and sometimes for ‘it’ as well. In Ojibwe, an indigenous North American language whose nouns are not classified by gender but according to whether they are considered animate or not, the singular third person pronoun wiin is used for both ‘she’ and ‘he’. In Turkish, the equivalent of ‘he’, ‘she’ and ...”

“... finds not only the usual academical drones and poseurs, but some touted names in contemporary North American literary criticism and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... of the term suddenly soared in the late 1990s, multiplying sixty times over and becoming, as John Gillingham, an economic historian attached to its earlier sense, remarked, ‘the current euphemism for overthrowing foreign governments’.Yet the relevance of its original meaning remains. Neoliberalism has not gone away. Its hallmarks are now ...”

“... the system. A few weeks after I first met Andy and Martha, I visited Michael at his home in North-West London. He showed me a letter sent by the Ministry of Defence to his late mother, Mary, in 2011 and signed by the defence secretary at the time, Liam Fox. ‘I apologise for Majella’s death and offer you my heartfelt sympathy,’ it reads. ‘On ...”