“... various peoples who came to them. He heard about the most famous of these visitors, a man from the north-western extremity of the world: ‘Li Madou was sent by the rulers of Macau to spy on the imperial court, which has caused recent consideration being given to clearing Macau out. There is a temple in Macau, in which Li Madou was once a monk.’ Li Madou was ...”

“... women prophets and seers. In this movement charisma certainly took precedence over authority. In North Africa, this conflict was intensified by questions about who had the power to forgive sins. The clergy increasingly claimed this as an exclusive clerical prerogative, but it was widely believed that prospective martyrs, suffering for the faith, could remit ...”

“... de Prat de Lamartine was born in 1790 to aristocratic parents in Mâcon in Burgundy, fifty miles north of Lyon. An only son with five younger sisters, he was a bright, restless adolescent, running away from one school and fathering a child by a servant at the Jesuit college he went to next. He was often intensely bored and discovered early that ...”

“... who had been taken captive. Some German troops were seasoned veterans of the Eastern Front or the North Africa campaign, but others were young and inexperienced recruits. D-Day was the first time that Private Franz Rachmann had handled a machine gun outside of training: ‘I shoot, I shoot! For each American I see fall, there came ten hundred other ...”

“... She was part kangaroo and part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan,’ wrote Paul Colin, who sketched her for La Revue nègre. Baker’s notorious horizontal movements were propelling her to the top of the world. Hers was the American dream, the assimilationist success story that (as Tylor Stovall argues in Paris Noir: African Americans ...”

“... Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however ...”

“... of industry, the role of the unions, immigration, education, the economic and cultural gap between North and South. Several columnists (on both sides of the political divide) attributed Britain’s recent sporting success to Thatcher’s influence, and the culture of money-oriented competitive individualism that characterised her time in office. The London ...”

“... with one another, and held together by little more than panegyric. The Christian kingdoms of the north were equally fragmented and subsisted on raiding the south. In an organised system of extortion, Muslim rulers struck deals with Christian kings and warlords, paying tributes known as parias in exchange for protection. Christian and Muslim rulers were ...”

“... the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So ...”

“... stoical insouciance of people who’d remained. The administration on the run was now headed by Paul Reynaud, a maverick conservative whose Churchillian instincts were never likely to prevail. Reynaud declared Paris an open city, but it was of no consequence for the many who’d already left and those who were scrambling out at the last minute. Hanna ...”

“... northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of that year, he took a train north but got off at Carlisle in order to make his way across the border on foot. His journey took him to bothies, youth hostels and hotel bars, where he could be found ‘singing himself drinks’ and seeking out the old songs and stories. In Glencoe an old man ...”

“... whose provenance is obscure). A large haul was made between 1911 and 1913, during an expedition in north-eastern Congo sponsored by the museum and led by an ex-military man, Armand Hutereau, to ‘enrich’ the collection.The field was highly competitive at the time. The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin had recently wrapped up a similar expedition, while ...”

“... categories of liberalism and conservatism are redundant in an era defined by the clash of the Fox-North coalitionists and a Pittite government which, at first anyway, favoured a measure of parliamentary reform. Bourke persuasively aligns Burke with what most modern scholars in the field – a few loud dissenters notwithstanding – would now identify as the ...”

“... We are reminded, for example, how closely modern British economic history has been linked to the North – T.S. Ashton, J.H. Clapham, M.W. Flinn and George Unwin were all, as were many others of their kind, born in the heartland of the Industrial Revolution. Did this demographic fact lead the profession to overestimate the dimensions of past ...”

“... poetic-intellectual (and hence living) space. For the last five years, I have been living on the north coast of Brittany, which I consider at once a symbolic and strategic situation. I am in Europe, as a Euro-Scot, as a Breton-Britisher, with Britain (about to become European) just across the water. My neighbours are Tristan Corbière (in whose work Eliot ...”