“... Portuguese, French, nor even the Dutch, a Protestant people, insisted on any such strict sex barrier for the maintenance of empire. There seems to be a more plausible explanation. The British Army was rotated between Britain and India, serving comparatively short periods overseas. The officers of the Indian Army took their social tone from the crack ...”

“... Cruises). This improved landscape cuts directly from the Royal Naval College to the Thames Barrier, so that the peninsula is not merely occulted, it doesn’t exist. Geography shifts to suit the strategic needs of the mappers. Territory belongs to those who sponsor the means of transport. If you have to visit the Dome, the local politicians imply, the ...”

“... The wall – weathered yellow brick grouted with carbon deposits and grime – is enough of a barrier to have doubled in television films, cop shows or faked documentaries as the exterior of a prison. The polluted acres of the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company were re-created, after war and bomb damage, as Haggerston Park. The man in the black ...”

“... historians have come to doubt if late 19th-century birth-control was in fact achieved by such barrier methods. They have also performed close studies of particular groups which suggest a great diversity within the courtship and bedroom practices in English society at any one time, and which point to birth control as a strategy resorted to, under certain ...”

“... of storytelling in this novel has to do with the death of a dog. Three characters are involved: Michael Luxton, a taciturn dairy farmer; Jack, his elder son, aged 26; and Tom, his much younger son, approaching his 18th birthday. The old sick dog, named Luke, was originally just a farm dog, then for many years Jack’s close companion, but now more recently ...”

“... emptiness of the Thatcherites’ early insistence on the effectiveness of penal coercion (‘the Barrier of Steel’ of which Mrs. Thatcher spoke in an infamous speech of May 1979) look obvious enough. But the narrow – ‘realistic’ – focus on street crime adopted by ‘left realist’ criminologists – who are in other ways quite critical of ...”

“... been a government-promoted Plan for Coal. No major industry could be allowed to languish. But, as Michael Flinn points out, it was not with the actual process of mining that 18th-century government concerned itself, but with the trading of the product. The coastwise traffic in coal was the largest activity of British shipping, a major training ground of ...”

“... cuts’. A three-part companion videotape can be had. Still, when the Foreword by Michael Atiyah remarks that ‘some of the presentation requires a technical understanding of the mathematics and physics’ this can seem a grave understatement. Very little of the volume will be intelligible to the ‘broader audience’ to which Atiyah ...”

“... organs’ and ‘genitalic contacts’. Which would be a great loss. Kevles has her own language barrier, but gives a neutral and informative account of female animals working out. Eberhard delineates a world, concealed from view by the weight of his academic burden, which is quite extraordinary. To advance his argument against the male focus in the history ...”

“... was first published, in Paris, in ‘the early Thirties’, according to its English translator, Michael Henry Heim. It appeared in the émigré journal Numbers and shortly thereafter as a book; fifty years of oblivion later, a copy turned up in a second-hand bookshop and was translated into French, bringing overdue fame to its ...”

“... who says it’s OK to carry on with the experiment. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Michael Collins, who circled the Moon while the first two men walked on it, years later admitted to each other that they privately put the mission’s chance of success (read: survival) at 50-50. That level of risk is no longer acceptable for anything carried on ...”

“... imperialism, remained pointedly un-Tory. He favoured a protectionist tariff wall: an external barrier behind which a global empire might trade, the revenues supporting social welfare at home. Tariff reform plagued the Tories for three decades, and a version of it was eventually implemented in the form of imperial preference by Chamberlain’s son ...”

“... over others that has blighted the rest of the Arab world. Here Hirst is in agreement with Michael Young, whose eloquent, colourful book is mostly about Syria’s attempt to control Lebanon: its murder of the Sunni leader and former prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005; the anti-Syrian protests which followed, known as the Independence Intifada ...”

“... and the rot runs deep, not only in Liverpool and London, but in other big cities too. Read Michael Crick if you need convincing – and he is concerned only with Militant’s structure within the Labour Party: The March of Militant3 is a brilliant piece of detective work, cool and dispassionate. How will the political future look from Kilroy’s new ...”

“... Farrier wants to hold an ice core – who wouldn’t? He wants his children to visit the Great Barrier Reef and ‘to see a future fossil in the making’. His account of their bleak tourist trip on an overcrowded boat under a sky busy with helicopters rubs up against his description of the scale, beauty, vulnerability and ecological importance of ‘the ...”