“... descend to a maximum of about fifty metres, where the air pressure is six atmospheres, and world-class free divers go down to about a hundred metres, where the pressure is ten atmospheres – more than enough to tell the human body that it doesn’t want to be there. Normally functioning submarines, meaning subs not designed for the special purpose of ...”

“... being seized by the settlers, leading to a decade-long period of violence known as the Black War. The Aborigines formed raiding parties who lit decoy fires, stole from food-stores, and occasionally attacked bystanders with their spears. The colonists campaigned loudly for action to be taken. In 1830 the infamous Black Line was thought up by George ...”

“... TV, all the Arabian channels you can stare at, Coronation Street dubbed into Arabic – class!), so being the experienced guys we are we sat and waited till it was over. On leaving the TV room I saw why the Yanks will never win a war. They were running all over the place in what can only be described as a mass ...”

“... commonly described as chronicling the decline of a landowning family – as it were, a sequel to War and Peace; and it has been suggested that it draws on Saltykov’s first-hand experience of that milieu, which would go a long way to explain his gloomy outlook: but to see it as social history or even as realistic novel is to miss the point. It’s certainly ...”

“... South Africa. As an antiwar campaign, the encampments recall protests against the Vietnam War, including the Student Strike of 1970, which grew significantly after the murder of four Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard.The encampments are also a parody, in Alareer’s sense: emerging from within the university, they offer another ...”

“... other recent stories with elderly protagonists, it also quietly charts collisions of period and class, and shows a keen, wry sense of the displacements worked by social change and old age. Sidney’s understanding is as limited as his vocabulary, which is a small, painfully unreliable work-force, fit for few jobs; Mrs Bittell’s head is ‘clouded by ...”

“... of another link between ritual and power beyond mere legitimation. Harm to the king’s body in war was said to demoralise soldiers and to bring defeat: ‘Disorder in the body entailed disorder in the reign.’ But when land and labour became subject to market forces, so the author tells us, royal control diminished. Contributions by two anthropologists ...”

“... is a Jewish refugee, who escaped from Germany with his mother, just before the outbreak of World War Two, so that the novel takes in Germany, Los Angeles, Mexico, and the North and South of England. On both sides of the Atlantic, privilege is set against poverty; council estates in London confront the gaudy affluence of Willy’s Mexican villa, as well as a ...”

“... Her emphasis is on Franklin as a scientist, very conscious of her professionalism, her social class, her Jewishness and her abilities. For Maddox’s Franklin there was no small talk, no beating about the bush: she was demanding, belligerent, aloof, at times curt, not an easy person to work with, either at King’s (1951-53) or at Birkbeck (1953-58). But ...”

“... Two of Lahiri’s stories show what’s missing. Both are set in Calcutta, both in lower-middle-class blocks of flats where only a few residents have telephones or running water, but everyone knows everyone else and interferes in their lives, mostly with the very best intentions. In spite of the current wave of Indian fiction in English, this particular ...”

“... contributions from Western and Russian palaeontologists; research hidden for decades by the Cold War now became available to specialists all over the world. The display of these geological wonders has a fascinating history of its own. The progressive sequence of life, familiar to any visitor to the fossil galleries at a natural history museum, was first ...”

“... a few random and suggestive samples. Strachey was a solitary explorer, writing in 1918 for a war-weary public that could tolerate Victoriana only in small, savoury doses. He could not foresee the Victorian Revival: the huge appetite that would send a navy of researchers across the ocean of evidence, lowering buckets, trawling nets, and bringing to light ...”

“... us about a marriage between an elderly Ukrainian man, who came to Britain after the Second World War, and a younger woman newly arrived from the Ukraine. Her new book, Two Caravans, has as joint protagonists a group of migrants who meet strawberry-picking on a Kent farm. Lewycka’s fictional world speaks of 3D jobs (dirty, dangerous or difficult), and of ...”

“... city that overcame the challenges of Napoleon’s blockades to the imperial capital that made war on the Boers. Like White’s previous survey, London in the 20th Century (2001), this book is at times very funny. He quotes a letter in which Dickens describes the parochial fire engine that put out a small blaze at the offices, just off the Strand, of his ...”

“... They were the containers in which millions of traps were shipped from the Black Country. Did World War Two bring a slump in trapmaking? Not in Australia, where a Wednesfield subsidiary toiled to produce the seven million traps needed to provide skins for army slouch hats and flying-suit linings. In 1953 the spread of myxomatosis failed to spread ‘misery and ...”