“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family gathered they talked about the Fenians and evictions, Black and Tan ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which Dyer makes from London to Stonehenge. A sign of the times, by the way, that both Ackroyd and John Fowles, in his latest novel, should send their Georgian creations crawling about Stonehenge, which not long ago would have seemed one of the purest un-Augustan activities. Ackroyd has taken Hawksmoor’s known interest in pre-Gothic architectural theory and ...”

“... rumour could get about that Radicalism was really nothing more than a misplaced desire to tease. John Wilkes met all these criteria, and was therefore much loved. Peter Thomas has produced the first serious study of Wilkes for some years. This neglect is surprising, in that Wilkes was the quintessential English Radical. With few teeth, a pronounced lisp and ...”

“... what is Mr Playfair doing writing a book about him? For an answer we may perhaps turn to Professor John Taylor, who has known Fred – or rather a mate of his called Uri – from both sides. Eight years ago Uri Geller – ex-fashion model, conjurer and convicted con-man – hit out television screens with a miraculous display of spoon-bending. The effect on ...”

“... captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one ...”

“... simply part of cosmological society, and the non-Buddhist shrines in the forest clearings of his north Indian territory were part of his aesthetic if not devotional landscape. ‘How delightful the Capala shrine is!’ he said during his terminal illness – an expression of pleasure of a kind which the scribes setting down the otherwise austere ...”

“... seems to mark a new area of peculiarly intense interest: in the early colonial period, much of North America was an immediate part of the British world (and some of its most important records are available therefore only in British archives); and Early Modern migration – not ‘immigration’ as such but something broader – which bridges the Atlantic ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... which has been reprinted in two editions since the war, with introductions by André Gide and John Carey. It is arguably Carey’s edition that has been chiefly responsible not only for the high reputation of the Memoirs and Confessions in England but also for the assumption that none of Hogg’s other fictions is worth bothering with. Carey dismissed ...”

“... were very considerable indeed, and the LCS recruited poorly; the Society’s heartland was north and east of Charing Cross, in Southwark and in the metropolitan parishes of Middlesex, where such opportunities were mainly the reserve of the rich and polite, and where the LCS may have helped fulfil the frustrated civic aspirations of literate and ...”