“... removed it seems from today’s Britain, where every other person on the high street is wearing a North Face weatherproof jacket, even out shopping. One fine morning in August 1956, the Meades family sets off to climb Snowdon. His mother sighs at their lack of waterproof coats but Jonathan and his father, along with many of the others out for a walk that ...”

“... and shot their British officers; other mutinies quickly followed across the Bengal army camps of north and central India. Thanks in part to newly laid telegraph lines, the company was able to prevent mutiny from spreading in the Punjab and elsewhere; the Madras and Bombay armies also remained ‘loyal’. But it was not able to prevent the mutineers from ...”

“... allowed postbellum Virginia to compete with the Mayflower pageantry cherished by the victorious North. Pocahontas is a household name. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock shows, there were many thousands of Native Americans in early modern Europe who have long been forgotten.The circumstances in which they crossed the Atlantic were diverse. Some came voluntarily ...”

“... was a Habsburg and a Catholic, and was nominally but not personally an arch-enemy of Elizabeth.) Kelley was also receiving regular letters from Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief adviser, begging him to return home ‘to honour Her Majesty … with the fruits of such great knowledge as God hath given him’. Or if he could not personally ...”

“... and some land), training (Architectural Association School, plus practice in London, Ireland and North America) and professional experience as the editor of the Architectural Review on and off since 1935. And he knew absolutely everybody. In his case, however, architecture meant the Modern Movement, something which the Establishment didn’t like at the ...”

“... Lee and Fraser show – from the rainbow Christ sits on in Memling’s Last Judgment and the one Elizabeth I holds in Isaac Oliver’s Rainbow Portrait to those in the sign outside the Rainbow Motel or round a tunnel entrance north of San Francisco (more than one culture has believed that if you go through the rainbow arch ...”

“... when he died. All had been lifted from Fincham’s ‘twopenny library’ on Colchester’s North Hill by my grandmother. Her modus operandi was simple. A regular and trusted customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want unwittingly to take the same one ...”

“... Belfast to Glanmore in County Wicklow in 1972 was to protect himself from what the final poem in North (1975) calls ‘Exposure’. In this fraught lyric, Heaney is in the woods of Wicklow, ‘feeling/Every wind that blows’; but physical exposure bothers him less than media exposure in Belfast, where journalists pumped him for his views on the ...”

“... whim, just as the events of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas are cast in a perpetual autumnal haze (as Elizabeth Bowen noted), in defiance of the usual arrangement of the seasons. Anglo-Irish disdain for the tedious requirements of naturalism? Certainly a moral pattern takes precedence over verisimilitude, in Irish fiction of the last century, and it’s usually ...”

“... of Roth’s writing.Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth, in 1894, in the small town of Brody, north-east of Lvov, in what was then Austria-Hungary, and is now the Ukrainian Socialist Republic of the USSR. He grew up with his mother, supported by his uncles, and in 1913 went to Vienna to study German. Initially a pacifist, he joined up in 1916 and served ...”

“... Irish pride and nationalism have always been magnified in the United States. In her autobiography, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the leader of the American Communist Party, described the attitudes of her Irish-born mother and American-born father: ‘Mama did not deny the faults or glorify the virtues of the Irish, as our father did. We were amused at this and often ...”

“... in the New York Review of Books and soon a column in Harper’s. Was she the second coming of Elizabeth Hardwick, or a kinder, gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ...”

“... in transatlantic slavery intensified. The Dutch West India Company (WIC) ruled over a colony in north-eastern Brazil from 1630 to 1654; in 1637, the WIC seized the fortress of Elmina on the west coast of Africa from the Portuguese. Between 1640 and 1660, no fewer than 164 slave voyages put to sea under the Dutch flag. The surviving records of applications ...”

“... and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the ...”

“... career, placing it in the context of British and Allied intelligence concerning Western Europe and North Africa. It gives a fascinating account of the way military intelligence is generated and the crucial role it plays in every military operation, with D-Day as a spectacular example. Third, Rowe offers a perceptive analysis of Austin’s personal qualities ...”