“... Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and stylistic sophistication of his writing seem almost other-worldly, though legend has it that his distinctive accent derives from a small community of Channel Islanders in New Zealand ...”

“... memorialist or seanchaidh, whose stories were edited into a book by the great Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell. Her words had gone on buzzing and irking in a corner of my brain. Most sources are agreed that the people left Pabbay and the last two islands in the chain, Mingulay and Berneray, quite freely, in a final despair at the harshness of the ...”

“... How far were they prepared to go by turning the idea of an exclusionary frontier between Global North and Global South into a career opportunity? Five of the 13 invited submitted entries, including an exquisite ‘glass forest’ by Eric Owen Moss, a practice in Culver City, LA. The most sinister submission was from Antoine Predock, a practice in ...”

“... made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his portfolio of North American newspapers, acting in concert with his close associate David Radler, whose sincerely expressed view was that the ideal newspaper consisted of ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Sackings, cuts, and fines for ...”

“... stage on which to perform. Politically speaking, far more significant things were going on to the north, in China proper. Malraux didn’t cross over into China during his stay in Saigon but he gave people to suppose afterwards that he had, that he had put himself about there and, in astoundingly short order, had even been taken on as a senior adviser to the ...”

“... every bough’. If Blake had kept going, he would have crossed the site which in 1969 became the North Peckham Estate. In postwar Britain, this forty-acre ‘mega-estate’, comprising 1444 homes in 65 multi-storey blocks, offered another kind of vision. It was ‘a paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under/a blanket, shielded from the world’, Caleb Femi ...”

“... No one in Washington could match him at it, not even, in the days before he became President, John F. Kennedy. He was handsome and slim and when he smiled, at first shy and then bold, everything stopped. He was the Sun King. Less the Sun King, given Halberstam’s subsequent characterisations, than Tamburlaine: but then we discover that when any one of ...”

“... Morocco, is Bowles at his most deeply Orientalist. Two native brothers and their nephew in a bare North African landscape are met by a stranger who, despite their hospitality, feels free to murder the two brothers and castrate the nephew. Having done so, ‘a new idea came to him. It would be pleasant to inflict an ultimate indignity upon the young Filali. He ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... rustic clowns in inbred Southern backwaters: there are no prejudiced, loutish ultra-conservatives north of the Mason-Dixon line (and certainly none in Washington). But the caricatures are affected, too. In Power and Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa ...”

“... difficult to stop Syngman Rhee starting a war, the British believed that the danger came from the North and were saying as early as December 1949 that there could ‘be no doubt whatever’ that the North’s ‘ultimate object’ was to ‘overrun the South’. When, the following year, the ...”

“... The Story of the ‘Big Issue’ (Earthscan, £12). Swithinbank begins her story in 1967 when John Bird (Anglo-Irish working-class family from Paddington slums; spent his formative years in detention centres, art schools and the Socialist Labour League) first met Gordon Roddick (public-school educated ex-wandering poet; later husband of Anita, founder of ...”

“... from those of neighbouring Georgia and Alabama. It is, of course, scarcely the case that North Florida grew more liberal over the past twenty years. Rather, the Cuban-American community finally seemed to realise that as long as Castro was alive their chances of returning to the island were nil. The result was that they began to turn their ...”

“... has written a wide-ranging study of resistance to British rule in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the Antipodes. Some of the longest chapters in his book deal with India. Chatterjee is a paid-up member of the professoriat, dividing his time between Calcutta – where for many years he headed a productive centre of historical research – and ...”

“... Chotsa chipewa! Choka!Take off your hat to me! Now scram!Say you’ve never heard of John Chilembwe,or of his mission church at MbombweHQ for his First War Risingfirst salvo for the Malawi nation.Yet as surely as my mother livedon the tracer-path planetleft behind in our world’s world lineso surely my memory discovers hernot in chemical coding but alive there stilland so surely John Chilembwe still gives offthat black light in his black preacher’s suitor is alive in all our pasts before our birthnot in the photos recovered when they shot him downbut still running from the troopstowards Moçambique unarmed, hot-fleshed,in dark blue coat, striped pyjama jacketcoloured shirt, grey flannel trousersrunning for about a mile beforeMlanje Police Private Naluso shot him;the bullet spun him around and around,Sergeant Useni hit him again,I hit him through the head,said Garnet Kaduya, Church of Scotland,in a language truly dead, but Chilembwe wasspinningas they pulled and snapped the life-threadin that present moment ...”