“... wonder at the scene below, when I saw – for the first time in all those years – the sun on the north side of King’s College Chapel, throwing long shadows I never imagined could exist.About five years ago my flying went through a bad patch, and on one particularly miserable flight I determined to give it up. I flew back to Cambridge airport, joined the ...”

“... embodied in MacDiarmid and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977-?). It may be that our nationalism is on a par with feminism as Dale Spender sees it: for ever having to be painfully rediscovered, rather than evolving continuously from strength to strength, without relapses between those peaks where ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... is lucky not to get eaten as well. Franklin’s famous expedition in Victorian times to find the North-West Passage is the theme of ‘The Age of Lead’, a tale which turns pollution into a bracing kind of art. Recently dug up from the permafrost, their surprised faces shown on TV, the members of the expedition died, it seems, of lead poisoning from the ...”

“... on a newspaper called the Caledonian that is so obviously the Scotsman (even down to the North Bridge office building) that one wonders why the author bothered with a pseudonym. Colley (like Banks) is a disciple of the ‘blessed St Hunter’ (a Scotsman detail that does not ring entirely true). As part of his Fear and Loathing in Midlothian act, the ...”

“... of a future conversion. Freud, indeed, was depressed by the cheerful reception of his ideas in North America because it proved that Americans had underestimated them, failing to see how disruptive they really were of all moral and social certainties. The stubborn Cartesians of France, on the other hand, unwilling to have their trust in the dignity and ...”

“... Leff says that he resembled Lenin by confusing mental categories with real life. After a trip north to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s chancellor Stephen de Garlande, to set up his own school in the cloister of Notre Dame. He becomes famous as the wizard of logic, launches the ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... was clear for the confiscation of land throughout the country. There was a particular plan for the North. In 1610 the English and Scots Privy Councils started the Plantation of Ulster, an arrangement by which settlers were established on the best land in the northern counties of Ireland. These settlers – or ‘undertakers’, as they were called – started ...”

“... In the north-west corner of Russell Square, on an extension to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a neatly lettered stone plaque attached to a nicely detailed brown brick wall reads: THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON HEREBY RECORDS ITS SINCERE APOLOGIES THAT THE PLANS OF THIS BUILDING WERE SETTLED WITHOUT DUE CONSULTATION WITH THE RUSSELL FAMILY AND THEIR TRUSTEES AND THEREFORE WITHOUT THEIR APPROVAL OF ITS DESIGN Directly below it a metal triangle records the Civic Trust award the building won in 1998 ...”

“... in the rock-leaved Bible of geology’. Those were the words of the pioneering geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1873. Thomas Moran, an experienced painter from Philadelphia, travelled with Powell, and had been to Wyoming and Montana with the US Geological and Geographical Survey two years ...”

“... book is interesting on the poverty and parental illnesses which dominated Gascoigne’s straitened North-Eastern childhood, and interesting also on the patterns of truculent, rebellious sensitivity which have characterised his relation with all types of authority: otherwise, Gazza! is pretty routine stuff. Unlike its subject. The new England manager recently ...”

“... better footage from their news helicopter. A shoot-out takes place in which Clarice’s friend John Brigham (who has, by the way, coached her to three successive interservice combat pistol championships) is killed, as is one of the two BATF agents who are anti-realistically called Burke and Hare. Clarice kills five baddies, including Evelda Drumgo ...”

“... was a provincial, from Figeac in the South-West, whose brains and ambition eventually drew him north, in the best Napoleonic tradition, to Paris and the Collège de France. He was first smitten with ancient Egypt, and the hieroglyphs that gave it so literally graphic a fascination, when he was a small boy. At the age of 11, having moved to Grenoble, he got ...”