“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was held hostage in Beirut, journalists found themselves asking what his links were with Oliver North. I have on my desk the daubs of a class of five-year-olds from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 1745-46, as well as plots in 1717 and 1753.In retrospect this was an era of intense party conflict north and south of the border. The early 18th-century ‘rage of party’ provoked unrestrained polemic, obloquy and satire between Whigs and Tories. This grand quarrel also included multiple skirmishes involving the parties’ allies and proxies: vicious ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... charter cruises on it. At the beginning of the week we’d been forty miles out in the Atlantic, north-west of Cape Wrath, exploring the uninhabited island of North Rona and the gannetry at Sula Sgeir. We’d gladly have spent the whole week on Rona, and that had been the plan. But an easterly wind had risen, and because ...”

“... General Sir Charles Napier, the commander of the forces against the 1839 Chartist uprising in the North, reported: ‘The Tory magistrates are bold, violent, irritating and uncompromising; the Whig magistrates sneaking and base.’ To W.P. Roberts they were all men of property, defending their property in the law courts. While they talked about ‘physical ...”

“... In​ 1978, Jacqueline Onassis thought it a good idea for her teenage son John to spend some months away from New York with the Youth Conservation Corps of the Yellowstone National Park. But John didn’t fit in, so she rang John Perry Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and owner of a twenty-thousand-acre Wyoming ranch ...”

“... of the night, Death on the Instalment Plan, and two that he wrote after 1945, Castle to Castle and North – are a brilliantly warped commentary on what he wanted us to know he had been through in his life, from a stinted, inhumane childhood in Paris in the opening years of the century to a last decade of sour, fulminating reclusion on the slopes of Meudon ...”

“... which uses the Upper House as a clerk might use Tippex. The ‘sober second thought’ which Sir John Macdonald, the first Canadian premier (and a notable inebriate) attributed to senates is largely the stuff of legend. To see what lessons may be learned from abroad, Meg Russell has examined seven upper houses in modern democracies. Rather oddly, she omits ...”

“... Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by ...”

“... in a country whose people wanted to kill them. We had already been ambushed by the Mojaheddin north of Charikar and when we had been driving southwards for another five hours, the convoy commander sitting next to me in the Soviet Army truck asked me if I liked Afghanistan. It was a beautiful country, I replied with a journalist’s discretion. But what ...”

“... In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas ...”