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“... wait a while. The plot was a double-braid: one strand was set in the 17th century during the Civil War and concerned an obsessive, self-absorbed mystic called Nicodemus; the other strand was set in the late 1950s in Sardinia and concerned a hydraulics engineer called Lucas Arnow employed by the Ford Foundation to drain the malarial swamps of the Sardinian ...”

“... For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world ...”

“... in the 1930s, was, when I arrived, just disappearing into the altered circumstances of the war. Similarly with Cambridge English. What Basil Willey, supported by Muriel Bradbrook and others, has called its Heroic or Golden Age ran from 1928 to somewhere in the 1930s. Tillyard saw loss or decline from about 1930. F.R. Leavis, in 1943, offered a sketch ...”

“... represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is not ‘equal rights for gay people’ so much as the ...”

“... so perhaps I’m now tweeness’s accepted measure. 28 September. At the outset of the Iraq war Tony Blair was determined not to be another Chamberlain. Now as he slowly prepares to leave office one can see that Chamberlain is exactly who he has come to resemble. In the 1930s Chamberlain put through some enlightened social legislation, but all anyone ...”

“... century saw a series of setbacks along the perimeter of settlement: from the French and Indian War in the Ohio Valley to the Tuscarora, Yamasee and Cherokee wars in the Carolinas. In the 1760s, the British future in North America was ransomed by the Odawa charismatic Pontiac, whose forces, numbering only three thousand, seized eight forts and besieged Fort ...”

“... been casualties of the imprisonment here of Scottish prisoners during the aftermath of the Civil War. The new notes in the cathedral’s leaflet now specifically disavow this without at the same time explaining how such radical mutilation occurred. This is somewhat mealy-mouthed, and rather than the fruits of some breakthrough study of the circumstances of ...”

“... breakfast at Chiswick House and the hero-worship flared up again. Ten yean later the Crimean War broke out and his hero was the most reviled man in Britain. Notoriously, the ducal Devonshires owned property almost everywhere except in Devon. For decades on end the Duke failed to visit his fine castle of Lismore in Ireland; the heavy spending went on ...”

“... conquest and was long reinforced by a pattern of discrimination that in effect made them second-class citizens. Every Quebec licence plate carries the motto Je me souviens. In this sense the situation has some parallels to Northern Ireland. The substantial enjoyment of equal civil rights is not enough to expunge the folk memory which sustains nationalism. A ...”

“... The fighting had stopped after 12 days and the guerrillas returned to the jungle to wage their war by e-mail. But they have continued to sow disorder throughout Chiapas and the whole of Mexico has been unnerved. By day, emboldened peasants, many of them landless, rush onto some local farm, occupy the owner’s outhouses and run up tattered flags, painted ...”

“... Greenland had become the highest in the world, and the homicide rate was comparable to that in a war zone. Miss Smilla is a remorseless, unforgettable indictment of this colonial history. In this way Høeg expands his chosen form almost beyond recognition, and it seems only appropriate to learn that there is no word for ‘thriller’ in Danish. Yet Høeg is ...”

“... for fear of extremist rivals taking over and South Africa falling apart in a murderous civil war. The indefatigable Pik Botha is reported to have pressed the emerging partnership ideology on an ANC dinner partner with the analogy: ‘We are in one boat, and the sharks to the left and the sharks to the right are not going to distinguish between us when we ...”

“... Lisa Anne Gurr combed through Simenon’s Maigret books to confirm that drinks indicate social class and that Maigret drinks a great deal of beer, brandy, wine and coffee; he has herb tea when ill. Anthropologists anxious to examine the habits of their fellow drinkers must be unrelaxing holiday companions. But alcohol – like food, sex and work – is a ...”

“... in County Cork, is the setting of The Silence in the Garden – decayed gentry rather than middle class. The Rollestons established their inheritance centuries before the book begins, and had an ancestral reputation for decency and kindness to their tenants during the Great Hunger. On the very first page the chronological parameters are drawn: It is ...”

“... who escapes to India in the Thirties, is interned there as an enemy alien for the length of the war, and lives out the rest of his life, poor and lonely, in a Bombay slum. His only friend is a feisty German who was once in cabaret in Shanghai – the kind of woman who might have been sung by Lotte Lenya or played by Marlene Dietrich in her Touch of Evil ...”