“... of nuclear weapons dramatically to alter international power relations has not been lost on North Korea and Iran, the two remaining members of the ‘axis of evil’. After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Kim Jong Il speculated that George W. Bush would not have gone to war had Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons. The ...”

“... poetry. Once again, I suspect, Braudel has exerted a silent influence, like the pull of magnetic North, on the terms of contemporary discourse. On the other hand he would argue that we must always bear in mind those static or slow-changing factors in nature against which human activities must invariably be dwarfed. Or, in this case, certain slow and ...”

“... in the Assessment are terrifying. By the end of the century, annual average temperatures in the north will rise between 3 and 5°C on land and up to 7°C over the Arctic Ocean, with winter temperatures increasing even more. Sea-ice cover will decline by 50 per cent, and could disappear entirely in summer. The Assessment expresses particular concern about ...”

“... qualified would occupy the two highest offices. In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for ...”

“... 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d ...”

“... Cavendish himself and by four men who sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... worried about the fate of African conscripts in any struggle between white men in the unforgiving north. Above all there was the fear that racial hierarchies might be jeopardised in the colonies when the war ended. White South African settlers were adamant about this. It was madness, in their view, to train Africans in the use of firearms. Instead, the ...”

“... One​ of the enduring mysteries of the relationship between Donald Trump and John Bolton, his third national security adviser, is how the two men ever came to terms in the first place. Bolton, an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, once canvassed for the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater and interned in the Nixon White House ...”

“... directly at me. “Yes,” I answered.’ Jacobson’s journey begins in Kimberley: he goes north through the Transvaal, across Bophuthatswana – which died in a blaze of ignominy last year – up to Botswana and from there into Zimbabwe, with a brief excursion into Zambia. For much of the time, he remains unsettled; engaged, amused, alarmed, seldom at ...”

“... forces in the world, and about the folly of trying to name them. Both books start in an old North America, the Texas and New Mexico of the Forties, places where men who live on horseback meet men in rickety trucks on new blacktop roads; and both books take their heroes to a Mexico which is even older, a land of memory and phantoms, of revolutionary ...”

“... a Malagasy princess, who was installed in 1720 as ruler of a new political entity on the coast of north-eastern Madagascar, the Betsimisaraka Confederation. Centred on the town of Ambonavola, or Foulpointe (now Mahalevona), and stretching for more than four hundred miles, the confederation had unified existing local polities through a combination of war and ...”

“... It seems that the likes of Edward Larocque Tinker, Robert P. Swierenga and Colonel John S. ‘Rip’ Ford have all made valuable contributions to our knowledge of the cowboy world, and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas* sets out to illuminate the structures and processes behind the historical underpinning behind those who wear spurs ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... Did the 13 mainland colonies of British North America become America before their inhabitants thought of themselves as Americans? That is the question raised by these two books. Each is a work of scholarly synthesis; each deals rather uneasily with the epochal event – the Revolution – that separates their respective periods; each is finally concerned with the onset of modernity in the world’s ‘first new nation’, as Seymour Martin Lipset described the United States ...”