“... were grounds for suspicion, Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered 14 or 15 youths in North London over a period of five years, would have been rounded up with the rest of us. But there were no grounds for suspecting anyone of being guilty of these murders, for until the grim day in February two years ago when a plumber found human remains in the ...”

“... sometimes mad, often funny and always stoned – leads his readers on a tour of Vietnam, south to north and south again into Cambodia. He frequently visits the DMZ, the old Demilitarised Zone, the symbol of Vietnam’s artificial bifurcation by the Western powers, at American insistence, in 1954. Fittingly, Page’s tale ends in the DMZ, where American ...”

“... Scotland’s regions. The Hudson’s Bay Company was staffed by Orcadians; its Canadian rival, the North West Company, was run by Highlanders; the sugar plantations of Jamaica were packed with younger sons of Argyllshire lairds; the great trading houses of South-East Asia were mostly family businesses from Aberdeen and ...”

“... In October​ 1961, John F. Kennedy and the entire White House press corps decamped to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to watch US airborne forces put on a show of power. It was the president’s first foray out of the Boston-Washington DC corridor to ‘meet the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day ...”

“... his memory in laudatory poems and improving books for the young. But it was not to last. When John Morley published his massive official biography in 1881, agricultural depression and industrial decline were beginning to erode the appeal of free trade in Britain. Morley’s book became both a vindication and an exercise in tact, and Cobden the ...”

“... place. It’s true that the main reference back is to more violence, a long-range desert patrol in North Africa in 1943, which Lyall brings to life as vividly as Popski once did in Private Army. Lyall has a feeling for battles long ago and knows his World War Two, which he has used in this way before. He could be said to be repeating himself. Certainly he ...”

“... Sandinista Nicaragua to the south-east, and war-torn El Salvador and Guatemala to the west and north, became the US government’s trusted ally. In 1981, the US ambassador in Honduras reported to Washington that he was ‘deeply concerned at increasing evidence of officially sponsored/sanctioned assassinations’: this wasn’t the message the Reagan ...”

“... culmination of a long, divinely-inspired progress – the triumph of freedom and democracy on the North American continent. The seed of liberty, planted by the earliest settlers, reached its inevitable flowering in national independence. Early in this century, Bancroft’s self-congratulatory narrative came under attack from two sources. The ...”

“... president’ and send forces to its former colony to fight ‘terrorist elements coming from the north’. ‘Today, the very existence of this friendly nation is at stake,’ he declared. ‘Military operations will last for as long as required … Terrorists must know that France will always be there when it’s a matter not of its fundamental interests ...”

“... which are often bedlam. High-minded modernist ideas and aspirations may have driven Colin St John Wilson to design his building as he did, but it’s the unruliness of some who go there that makes it appealingly lived in. Study describes what goes on inside, obviously – except, and equally obviously, when it doesn’t – but in its outward aspects the ...”

“... among them Jefferson, Lecky, Baldwin, Churchill, Guedalla and Plumb (who lumps George with King John as ‘one of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it ...”

“... when you look south, you see the unsightly coast of the Gulf of San Miguel. Only when you look north do you see a vast expanse of water. It seems a little farfetched that Balboa should have looked north and seen a South Sea. He wanted, in any case, to own all that he couldn’t see, ...”

“... to Africa, and then between the slavers and those who bought people from them in the Caribbean and North America. This does explain the centrality of banking and insurance to the slaving enterprises of Liverpool (and Bristol and London), but the trade was equally based on credit in Africa between European slavers and local merchants. In the ...”

“... song was that of a raped and mutilated woman. In the poetry of the 13th-century Franciscan John Peckham, the nightingale foresees the hour of her own death, singing from the top of a tree and descending ever lower, until finally she expires on the lowest branch at the ninth hour.Nightingales winter in sub-Saharan West Africa and then journey six ...”

“... United States. For Pérez, becoming Cuban means becoming like an American (he prefers to say ‘North American’, though in Cuban usage an American from the US is less often a norteamericano than a plain americano, as in the revolutionary song that goes: ‘Fidel, Fidel, ¿qué tiene Fidel?/Que los americanos no pueden conél’ – ‘Fidel, Fidel, what ...”