“... or Otaheite’. The same October week that Grace scrawled out ‘crisis’, loyalist fortunes took a desperate turn when Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, sealing Britain’s defeat. Within a matter of months, British forces began withdrawing. The Galloways’ predicament was replayed in loyalist households across America. What would ...”

“... sympathies (in spite of my official views generally) are against the coup’ – but he took no stand against the junta. With all the praise for A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, there came a few catcalls. Too many epithets, too many magnificent landscapes. And what sort of footsore traveller was this, who spent so many nights ...”

“... Purrrfect!’ That was last summer, and new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning. I took my Californian friend inside, to get a feel of the hessian-clad walls; the cloth is a little frayed by now, but the décor still gave off aromas of patchouli, Nesquik, joss sticks, Players No. 6, beanbags, and this and that kind of grass. The University of ...”

“... West German economic miracle. The occupation is often remembered as the moment when young Germans took to jazz and, like Sollors, aped the casual manner of the American soldiers posted in their country, but it was primarily a time of hunger and misery, as the Germans burrowed into ruins, or joined crowds of ragged DPs trekking across the country. ‘We ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... I recently​ took part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the Home Office and its officials ...”

“... Around​ forty years ago, a friend of mine took his own life in the middle of a party he was throwing in his apartment. A neighbour who happened to look outside saw him climb onto the window ledge, hesitate briefly and then jump to his death from the fifth floor. His guests were stunned when the police rang at the door ...”

“... throughout the second century AD, authors such as Achilles Tatius, Dictys of Crete, and Lollianus took up Phoenicia as the subject and the setting of their fictional works. Heliodorus famously plays with the word phoinix throughout his novel, using it in every possible sense: merchants from Tyre, the dark red colour of murex dye or blood, dates and palm ...”

“... union will never be the same again. A saucy genie of empowerment has escaped from the bottle. As John Curtice wrote in the Herald in July, ‘all the lives of everyone in Scotland have been affected by the devolved government in a way they’ve frankly not been in the previous 21 years of devolution.’ The Anglo-Scottish union was under new strain ...”

“... composition by the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, showing the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist. The original has been in Rome since about 1790, possibly much earlier, and many copies are recorded. The image beneath the portrait is somewhat smaller than the one in Rome. It is known that in 1517 Sarto painted a picture of an unspecified ...”

“... Truman as president and inherited the Mossadegh problem. The new administration – which included John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen, now director of the CIA – largely endorsed the views of the outgoing team. In a memo written at the beginning of March assessing the situation in Iran, Allen Dulles advised Eisenhower that ‘a ...”

“... secure a majority in a Northern Irish parliament. Sinn Féin won 27 seats to the DUP’s 28, and took three of Fermanagh’s five seats, deposing Foster’s DUP colleague Lord Morrow. The results gave a considerable boost to the parties opposed to Brexit.Thirty thousand people cross the Irish border every day for work. Farmers in the border areas rely ...”

“... the world.’Erica is a twin whose sister played the piano fast and moved slowly: ‘The slowness took her away, drew her in like an abyss.’ Is Carrère’s slow book attempting a similar trick? He is learning to type on typing.com. His editor, who always wanted to read him ‘immediately’, has died. A writer who in the past always placed himself at the ...”

“... was at the end of Leahy Road in Sandymount. It is where, reputedly, on 16 June 1904, James Joyce took Nora Barnacle on their first date, when she slid her hand down inside his trousers to move his shirt ‘softly aside’. With hindsight, Joyce saw something in that moment (eyes closed, eyes open): a kind of crux in his life, the fact that his future had ...”

“... was looking for a ‘handbook of computer crime’, allegedly being published by the company. It took away every item of computing equipment, printers, disks, tapes that it could find. Highly sensitive information about the E911 system – an extended version of 911, the American equivalent of the 999 emergency number – was found on several hacker ...”