“... in Africa; I attended the opening of a health centre a year or so ago in West Nile Province in the North of Uganda. The four-wheel drive vehicle bearing the District Medical Officer arrived with the slogans of the Ugandan anti-Aids campaign painted on its doors in English: ‘Love Carefully’, ‘Zero Grazing’. The Medical Officer, and the Chairman of the ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move ...”

“... to tell the tale.Emecheta was born in Lagos in July 1944, the wettest month at latitudes just north of the equator. Her father was a railway worker who had fought with the British in Burma and her mother was a seamstress. She was born eight weeks early, a baby not much bigger than a rat, and a girl when every newlywed wished for a boy. She survived by ...”

“... George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been unlikely to come across, she says, let ...”

“... claimed that factory life undermined sexual morals, at least in respect of the cotton mills of the North-West. On the other hand, this was certainly a case where Place did not obey his own excellent rule of sticking to first-hand observation, which might contradict preconceptions. He uttered some nonsense about the puniness induced in those who start having ...”

“... In the year he died, Cornell remembered that he sent one of his boxes to a starlet called Sheree North, but never heard from her. When Audrey Hepburn gave a performance as Ondine in New York in 1954, he sent her one of his owl boxes in tribute. She had it sent back to his home. Tilly Losch, the international good-time girl, and a recipient of Cornell’s ...”

“... might have taken his ten-year-old son to Coventry to see the entertainments laid on for Queen Elizabeth is firmly quashed (there’s no evidence for any such excursion and Tudor family life wasn’t like that), and, as if as an emblem of the fate of all such sweetly decorative fancies, even Schoenbaum’s account of the pretty bedroom walls at the Oxford ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... The English Crown had already ‘planted’ quite a few of her people in the castle towns of North Wales, where Edward I inflicted a sort of apartheid on the Welsh. Far larger plantations were to follow in Munster under Elizabeth, then in Ulster in the 1600s, where more than a hundred thousand people, many of them ...”

“... costs, have been growing faster than wages.Tillett lived with his father, Benjamin (his mother, Elizabeth, died when he was three), and his seven siblings. His family also rented out a room. A house on the street where Tillett was born now sells for between £300,000 and £500,000. In 2021, 55 per cent of households in Easton owned the accommodation they ...”

“... by no means always been the case. Fifty-odd million years ago, not only was there no ice at the North Pole, the temperature there was 23ºC. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last cool snap of this current ice age – known as a ‘glacial’, to distinguish it from the warmer ‘interglacial’ of the type we are living through now – much of ...”

“... have seen it in my first vacation from Oxford in January 1955 and in memory had put it somewhere north of Oxford Street, Portman Square possibly. In fact it was in Forbes House in Belgrave Square: not knowing London I took Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street. Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance ...”

“... it … [Blair] cited a New Yorker essay full of barbed quotes about Hillary from [Sally] Quinn and Elizabeth Dole, the senator’s wife, plus a popular new novel about the 1992 election, Primary Colors. All she knew of that book, said Hillary, was that she cussed like a sailor and was portrayed in a graphic one-night stand with George Stephanopoulos, of all ...”

“... where threatened species live now, or do you try to set aside land, say, a hundred miles to the north of where a species now lives in anticipation of warmer global temperatures shifting ecosystems northward? Is a hundred miles far enough? Too far? Given all the unknowns, does this strategy make any sense? As the recent UN report notes, more than half a ...”