“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was the key component of a British stratagem to persuade Germany in 1943 that the Allies in North Africa were about to invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. This highly classified and successful undertaking, a wheeze thought up by the part-time thriller writers and trout fishermen who populated the British intelligence services, remained top ...”

“... in the paper’s circulation in the South even while it continued to print exclusively in the North, a trend accelerated by its anti-Suez, stand in 1956 (which, contrary to contemporary mythology, did not cause a loss of circulation). The key factor in Scott’s calculation was that a large circulation outside the ...”

“... The structural similarities between the attitudes of Dublin governments to the language and to the North are as horrifying as they are instructive. In Ireland a national aspiration is that which, at all costs, must never be attained. Make that your prior determination and the aspiration can always be kept. Speak for it, work against it. In doing both, with ...”

“... history. Kiberd is, in fact, a victim of Southern Irish post-colonial trauma (both sides in the North fiercely resist being defined etc by others). He says: ‘We lose if we uncritically accept the old racialist stereotypes. We lose if we critically reinterpret them, because we are still sanitising a slur. And yet we lose also – even to the point of ...”

“... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...”