“... him by reading out inspirational bits of Frederick the Great. Carlyle has usually fared better in North America, where more respectable enthusiasts have never been scarce. He had enormous difficulty in getting a British publisher for Sartor Resartus, his first important book, written in 1831, and eventually settled for serial publication in Fraser’s ...”

“... disrupting food chains and driving native fish species to near extinction. Their conquest of North America’s waterways has been halted only because the army has for the last two decades maintained a barrier of electric charge across the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connects the Des Plaines to the Great Lakes basin, home to a fifth of the ...”

“... have just as much right to my opinion as they.’ Many servants, especially from the North of England, brought a knowledge of trade unionism and its tactics to the campaign for the vote. They also organised themselves. Central to Schwartz’s book – and closest to her heart, I suspect – is her research on the Domestic Workers’ Union of ...”

“... need drives themto recruit in our German war,the Boche attacking by lake and landfrom the North, long lines of porterscarrying munitions on their heads,dying in a two-thirds majorityover the whites, their only democracy.It’s unjust, but they’re not ready for any other.As Miss Marguerite Roby said in her recent book:‘It is conceivable that the ...”

“... received psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital in 1980. Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, left the briefing and branded him a ‘psychopath’ – a slur it has been hard for Father Aristide to get over. It would be convenient for the traditional Haitian elites and their allies abroad if Aristide, who has been forced to preside over ...”

“... Debunking explorers seems to have become a popular pastime. In recent years, Oliver Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad ...”

“... the CIA’s clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North. Over time, Casey’s position hardened into CIA dogma, which its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the ...”

“... copy in Edinburgh University Library. In it he describes the ideal studio as having a northerly or north-easterly aspect, with light from a ‘great and fair’ window without ‘impeachment or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof ...”

“... hydrology, the drainage of the fens and the settlement and dispossession of Indigenous land in North America. This is the kind of Olympian perspective demanded by the planetary crisis and, it seems, by current historiographical tastes: The Burning Earth has received prizes from, among others, the Toynbee Foundation and the British Academy.It’s easy to ...”

“... Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands is Volume 100 of the New Naturalist series, started by Collins after the Second World War with the aim of making ecology accessible to the increasing numbers of people who visited the countryside and had a serious curiosity about what it contained. It included such early classics as R ...”

“... and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the ...”

“... in Dickens and the Workhouse, that it must be the most famous workhouse of all – the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s imagination it’s more likely to have been in ...”

“... of books about strange mental conditions by a fictional writer not entirely without resemblance to Oliver Sacks. She greatly admires the books but is even more amazed by the selfless devotion of the friend who drew her attention to them. ‘She was in Daniel’s debt again . . . And she, once again, had given him nothing . . . Of all the alien, damaged ...”

“... the wife’s romance with one British officer and her scrambles up the pyramids with another; the North African desert; Alexandria, Luxor, Damascus. The series, combined with some well-timed Virago reissues, was crucial in bringing Manning’s work a wider readership. A quarter of a century after her death, Neville and June Braybrooke’s Olivia Manning: A ...”

“... hinder the growth of that affection. In 1890, Stan Laurel was born in Yorkshire to a girl from the North Riding and a man who made his own greasepaints. But Stan’s father, Arthur Jefferson, did more than that: he was a theatrical entrepreneur and a writer of plays and sketches. Stan grew up in the theatre, making his first stage appearance at the Glasgow ...”