“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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, ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its first 48 years, a period of dominance interrupted only by the single-term administrations of John Adams and his son John Quincy. Conversely, 24 years after Andrew Jackson of Tennessee left the White House in 1837, the next generation of Southerners led 11 states out of the Union, founding a Southern Confederacy to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but the use made of those failures by the endlessly influential revolutionary propaganda of John Mitchel, which presented the disaster as a deliberate genocide, arousing answering echoes to this day in American school curriculums. America remains relevant. The construction of ‘advanced’ Irish nationalism at home relied on buttressing from ...”

“... as awe-struck admirers of the Sublime used to call it, is one of the unquestioned show-pieces of North American geology. The word ‘show-piece’ seems appropriate because the Grand Canyon, to give it the name canonised by the advertising of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, is a kind of permanent media-event whose skilful presentation to the ...”