“... of the Ottoman Empire, had always been a hard place to occupy and control: mountains to the north, marshlands to the south. Air power proved a cheap and effective solution. In the 1920s, Iraqi airspace became a laboratory for the refinement of reconnaissance techniques. Aerial photography and its rapid translation into cartographic media made it ...”

“... Best-Seller At half past nine that evening Edwina’s body was brought to Broadlands. Commander North had asked the staff to come to the house if they wished; everyone was there, lined up, waiting. What were they to do? He fell back on naval discipline. ‘Off caps,’ he ordered as the car turned into the drive. Edwina’s dog, Snippet, ran out to greet ...”

“... armourers!’ The Argentine Air Force lost 74 strike aircraft during the Falklands campaign. Dr Paul Rogers, defence analyst at the University of Bradford, can show that they have been replaced by at least 107 new aircraft. In April 1982, only five Argentine aircraft were capable of delivering air-to-surface Exocet missiles. The number has now swollen to ...”

“... or to future generations the overflowings of [my] mind ...’ The passage is quoted both by Paul Dawson and Claire Tomalin, and I can give no better indication of the different styles and standpoints of their two books than by reproducing their comments on it. Dr Dawson, whose work is a detailed, scholarly study of Shelley’s political ideas, writes ...”

“... easily be altered. Very often, a structure simply does not lend itself to plausible decipherment. Paul Ricoeur has already pointed out that Lévi-Strauss’s method, developed for the most part while he was studying the mythology of the Indians of North and South America, works best for those societies whose mythology has ...”

“... ritualised way of life. These meanings have held fast for centuries. The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1874 that ‘colonisation is a considered act, subject to rules, which can only originate in highly advanced societies. Savages and barbarians sometimes – even often – emigrate [but] only civilised peoples colonise.’The ...”

“... to draw on for her prose. It shows when she muses about Diana’s final moments after Henri Paul arrived ‘to drive her away through celebrity’s electric storm. Does she think then of her sons, asleep in a Scottish castle? As she slides quickly into the back seat of the Mercedes on that close Parisian night, does she suddenly miss the cool English ...”

“... adds, ‘it was like coming home.’ But to which home? Bob could buy several small towns in the North of England and still have enough money to buy Zanzibar, and I don’t mean the nightclub in Uxbridge. He was a winner in a year when many people weren’t, and that’s the big news from this year’s Rich List: the number of billionaires is down for the ...”

“... Mandelstam.Vallejo was born in 1892, the youngest of eleven children, in an Andean town in the north of Peru. Using the word for a child of mixed heritage (his father was white, his mother was Indigenous), he referred to himself as ‘your unforgettable cholo’; ‘machetón’ (‘big machete’) is what his schoolmates called him, on account of his ...”

“... populations become less habitable because of climate change, the impetus to move from South to North will increase. Just one of these factors on its own – either depopulation in the North or climate change in the South – could be enough to drive mass migration. Taken together they make it inevitable. Anyone who ...”

“... to the ‘Field Day’ standpoint has already been mooted in the essay on Seamus Heaney’s North: she dislikes the practice of equating one set of circumstances with another, without sufficiently allowing for the differences between the two. Hence, she says, Heaney’s Iron Age Danish excavations yield up material so alien to contemporary Ireland that ...”

“... as nearly as humans can to the processes of nature itself. If you look at the photographs by Paul van Vlissingen taken monthly from one August to the next at Rudha Cailleach, or Witches’ Point, on the north shore of Loch Maree, you find you’re watching a mobile image, pregnant in each of its 13 stages, the more so ...”

“... peace in the early hours of the morning while playing a drunken game of bicycle polo with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He insisted that behaving this way was his birthright and that he had merely been entertaining those he had woken up. What made all the difference was war and the Guards. All four joined up, keen to do their duty but also to see action; the ...”

“... was a communist. The artists designated ‘masters’ at the Bauhaus, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, were no less diverse, as were the few women who rose to prominence through the workshops. That rise was rare in art schools of the time; today, however, the textiles of Anni Albers, the photographs of Lucia Moholy and the design ...”

“... are no closer to his material objects than Thomas Hardy’s, for all that the former came from the North-East and the latter from the South-West. The relationship between language and the world is not a spatial one, any more than the relation between a spade and the act of digging with it. The celebrated ‘materiality’ of a poet like Heaney is really a ...”