“... 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 ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... Her agreement with Putnam for three more Scarpetta mysteries guaranteed her $24 million for the North American rights. British rights were disposed of to Little, Brown and their paperback subsidiary Warner Books for a reported £2 million. A film of From Potter’s Field is in production. An exultant Cornwell described the Putnam deal as ‘the biggest ever ...”

“... Yesino.Yerofeev’s father, appropriately enough, was a stationmaster at Poyakonda in the far North, who, in the purge year of 1938, when his son was born, made the mistake, in his cups, of criticising the regime, and got 15 years in a gulag. Brought up in an orphanage, the young Yerofeev did brilliantly at school (the Soviet system had no choice but to ...”

“... the Treaty ports came up for review, it may well have been the existence of that bridgehead in the North-East which allowed the Chiefs of Staff to describe the ports as an ‘awkward commitment’. It was, as Fisk points out, the first time that the military had ever wavered in their defence of the territorial imperative. An opening was created for de Valera ...”

“... for his homeland, which he once contrived to revisit. His sons are wholly Australian. In a pub up north, Arkady and the author meet a policeman who has thought of a marvellous title for a bestseller, to rival Killer’s Pay-Off, Shark City or The Day of the Dog. Convinced he can sell it for 50,000 US dollars, he is reluctant to impart it to the author except ...”

“... an elegiac vignette of the disasters of Polish history, partly the story of a visit Schama paid to north-eastern Poland in search of – he is not quite sure what, but it was somewhere there that his mother’s grandfather, a Jewish lumberjack in the great forest, had lived and worked. The two following chapters contrast the different ways in which the forest ...”

“... satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... flukes of its horizontal stabiliser’. He flies with freight from Amsterdam to Cape Town, north to Anchorage, and east on the Tashkent Route across Russia to Uzbekistan, Kabul, Karachi, Singapore and Jakarta. The freighters carry the coffins of returning nationals; a matching set of four blue Porsche 911s; a complete prefabricated California ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell​ of Fairmont, North Carolina lived one of the classic American lives: dreamy boy in a Southern town with a mother interested in the finer things, read a zillion books in college following no particular plan, decided he was going to get a newspaper job in New York City and become a writer, and by God did ...”