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“... For many people the BBC Foreign Affairs Editor John Simpson, who stayed behind in Baghdad when Armageddon was scheduled to begin, was the civilian hero of the Gulf War. The only thing that may have puzzled them was his title. How could a man edit reports coming from all quarters of the globe if he deliberately isolated himself under conditions of siege? On this matter From the House of War provides little help, except for a passing reference to the author’s ‘rather empty title’, which apparently carries important psychological impact when dealing with Iraqi (and other) civil servants, perhaps pandering, in the case of the Iraqis, to their notion that the whole world ought to be edited from Baghdad ...”

“... it out, ahead of schedule. By the end of the First World War, exploration had already reached the North and South Poles, and had found the sources of all the major rivers, but no climber had yet got to the top of the world’s highest mountain, or even close to its foot. (The mountain straddles the border between Tibet and Nepal: Tibet was a closed country ...”

“... were evermore barking and baying (as an ancient writer saith) about the Roman Empire.’ The north-south divide was clearly legible on the landscape. Camden’s account of an island separated by Roman-inspired civility was not seriously challenged until the 18th century. Hingley presents a careful and detailed history of antiquarian accounts of the wall ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped ...”

“... to any government in his lifetime. And then as the election approached there was Tebbit, what John Biffen called the ‘Raucous Tendency’ – ‘Dracula’, as he was more affectionately known in the Party – making a mess at Central Office and daring to hint at his coming succession. By the end of her second term, so often a risky time for a ...”

“... mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had ...”

“... seen by night and day, and amazing silhouettes of people, pumps and scaffolding. It’s as if John Ford had decided to start a western among the California oil rigs, and track his story up the West Coast to Puget Sound. The space around the people in this movie is so large and so unambiguously beautiful you have to wonder what story it is trying to ...”

“... Cret, chair of the steering group of the American Battle Monuments Committee, told the architect, John Russell Pope, in 1925: ‘This is the most important monument and for this reason it has been entrusted to you.’ Pope was one of the most successful and visible American architects of the era – he designed the National Gallery in Washington, the ...”

“... critics. Happily, such praise was soon forthcoming – the Fugitives included future eminents like John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren in addition to the usual line-up of duffers – and the group’s magazine, the Fugitive, was widely welcomed as the voice of a significant new literary movement. This was a period when every new movement was deemed to be ...”

“... arrives in Grimshaw’s parish, which is called Haworth: their name is Brontë. Virginie, by John Hawkes, proclaims its intentions boldly on its pretty jacket: ‘a lush erotic masterpiece,’ runs the legend, beneath a reproduction of Greuze’s Cruche Cassée. One may in fact wonder whether it was the picture that gave rise to the story, rather than ...”

“... the context of the ‘oak-hazel province’, which in England and Wales had always dominated the north and west and came to dominate much of the south and east once lime had mysteriously declined after the Bronze Age. Vera believes that oaks reproduced within light thorny thickets where animals could not get at them. Once they had grown up and overtopped the ...”

“... American Revolution and the war of 1812, the US invaded Canada, hoping to annex it. Imagine what North America would look like today if Canadians had not promptly evicted the intruders. During the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, which resulted in the acquisition of California and the modern-day Southwest, many Americans advocated the absorption of the ...”

“... of transportation larger than a taxi, my wife and I had finally come to rest next door to a pub in North Southwark. Catapulted into local politics at a critical time for the Labour Party both locally and nationally, I was to learn a great deal in a very short time about politics in general and the Labour Party in particular, about the relation of the strange ...”

“... shavings on the floor.I knew that the captain of the Bonhomme Richard had been a Scotsman called John Paul Jones: I had once passed through Kirkbean, the Kirkcudbrightshire village where he was born. And I was vaguely aware that Jones had been involved in a daring raid on Whitehaven in Cumbria, although – since he was said to be the father of the US navy ...”

“... the Hudson to West Point with friends for the day. Brooks had already been the mistress of General John Pershing and had helped break up the marriage of the British admiral Sir David Beattie. She was introduced to the glamorous young Superintendent. It was, in Perret’s view, a case of mutual and instantaneous lust. Others diagnosed the meshing of public ...”