“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... appeared, connecting the northwest tip of San Francisco (Fort Point) to Marin County and the north. The Golden Gate – painted a kind of brick-red, running north-south, and serving as the transom to the Pacific – is shorter, but it is better looking and better known. One of the most striking views of the Golden Gate ...”

“... Bolinas is a sleepy little seaside community about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, at the end of a long, windy road over the hills. It isn’t easy to find the turn-off, and over time residents have put up misleading signs or camouflaged helpful ones in order to discourage tourists. For many years a fair number of artists and writers have made Bolinas their home, or one of their homes ...”

“... 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 ...”