“... gesture. By the altar stood the angel of the Annunciation with a lily branch in his hand; and by a north aisle window stood a canonised Pope with an anchor by his side and beside another a much decayed Tree of Jesse. Do you remember the frescoes? Thence across the fields beneath murmuring poplars to the main road between Eyn-sham and Witney. Crossing this we ...”

“... of its ordinary lives. The word ‘community’ is frequently used by spokesmen from the North of Ireland, and many of the poets in this anthology come from Ulster, from both its communities. The troubles of that country might well give a particular edge to a poet’s sense of the word, not in its insipid civil meaning, but as a literal of how people ...”

“... You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or Makesicko, City has reached thirty million human beings and four times as many rats. Further north, the greater part of the old republic has been annexed by the United States, and further north still the Last Playboy Centerfold Contest is being held in Chicago – perhaps the one cheerful prophecy that Carlos Fuentes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the form of expenses’, for various trips.Early in his career, Gott stood in the 1966 Hull North by-election. On 7 November 1965, Henry Solomons, the Labour MP for the constituency, died after a short illness. He had won the marginal seat from the Tories at the 1964 general election with a majority of 1181 votes on a turnout of 47,717. His death ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”