“... notion for cartographers and their historians. Sometimes it means plain old accuracy: there is no North-West Passage emanating from Hudson Bay; there are continents beyond the Mediterranean ‘oecumene’ – the ‘inhabited world’. Only ignorance and deliberate falsehood sin against this standard of objectivity. When scientific cartographers worry about ...”

“... who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice.’) But in looking to a fantasy north-west for salvation she was borrowing from the stranded Anglo-Australian tribe in which she was raised. A whole people misplaced, continuing to perform ‘airless episodes of England’ long after they were out of date: ‘Refinement was maintained on the ...”

“... not far from Pristina. Like the other enclaves and the bigger swathe of Serb-inhabited territory north and west of the Ibar river, Gracanica voted in the Serbian elections. The UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) and the Kosovo Albanian government in Pristina were unhappy about the Kosovo Serbs casting votes in local elections under ...”

“... on their noses. I didn’t choose Wimbledon because of any local connection (I grew up in North London) but because I had seen them on TV in the mid-1970s, where they featured as non-league FA Cup giant-killers, or at least giant-stunners, holding the mighty Leeds United to a goalless draw before losing 1-0 in the replay. When Wimbledon were invited ...”

“... diversity of accents matching each actor’s distinctive shape, skin and race. A diminutive North African Jew as elephant-headed Ganesha, then as Krishna. Vyasa, the bard of the poem, a ginger-haired Gascon. Tiny, tightbound Japanese, long-limbed loping Senegalese, pale-skinned Germans and Poles, a wide-lipped Lebanese, a princess with streaming black ...”

“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... 1000 kg bombs. ‘The blast from an 800 lb bomb,’ he wrote after studying damage at Tripoli in North Africa, ‘will frequently not even kill a fully-exposed rabbit at 100 ft. It certainly would not kill men at this distance.’ A scientist was on the way to establishing something the military had not considered: that there were limits to the effectiveness ...”

“... in September 2003, and another into incidents that occurred in May 2004 at a British army base north of Basra, while a third inquiry has been requested on behalf of 102 other Iraqi citizens. Since Cameron’s announcement WikiLeaks has suggested that there may well be 15,000 hitherto unrecorded Iraqi deaths, leading the Guardian to request, under the ...”

“... senior thesis at Reed College in faraway Oregon and in graduate school at Duke in not much closer North Carolina. In 1982 he published Death in a Promised Land, a pioneering account that remains the starting point for anyone learning about the massacre. The work did not gain a large readership, though Ellsworth tells us that it was among the books most ...”

“... against France. Howard shows that France was suspicious of British and American designs on French North Africa and Madagascar too. France faced nationalist resistance in all these places, but consistently imagined that the resistance was being fomented by London and Washington. Howard says nothing about Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, which was taken by ...”

“... the original, itself somewhat pretentious on occasion, is distorted into scholarly babble: the North ‘was precisely where a new type of recourse took shape, fanned by the temptation to return sincerely to nature’ renders ‘c’est au nord que se dessine un nouveau recours, que gonfle la tentation du retour à l’authentique nature.’ Where the ...”

“... the talent of Keith Richard), his preoccupation with the Travelling Man (the narrator is driving north to Canada, and later seems to cover most of the freeways of America), and his superstitious belief in the interventions of Fate (the driver hits a black raven, killing it, and then follows the voice of the raven’s feather instructing him to deliver it to ...”

“... on the Western Front increased from 3.25 million to more than four million men by April 1918. Paul von Hindenburg, a stolid general who effectively replaced the kaiser as the figurehead of the German war effort after being brought out of retirement to win spectacular victories on the Eastern Front early in the war, and Quartermaster-General Erich ...”

“... the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood arrive at a swanky restaurant called Chez Paul to try and persuade their old trumpet player, Mr Fabulous, to rejoin the band. ‘From the start,’ Klein writes, ‘it was obvious that Woody was going to be in rare form that night. He swooped down on the hors d’oeuvres and gathered clumps of them in ...”

“... in response to local pressures, regulating the food market and nationalising the coalmines in the north, whose operators had collaborated with the Nazis. In southern France, where communist-dominated resistance networks remained active, the state came under pressure to carry out significant purges of the police force, many of whose members had compromised ...”