“... States and Britain’s military chiefs, who took seriously Iceland’s threats to opt out of the North Atlantic surveillance chain monitoring the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet, London effectively surrendered the two hundred mile zone to Reykjavik. Cruelly, the man obliged to seal the deal was the Labour MP for Grimsby, the then foreign secretary, Anthony ...”

“... regeneration. ‘There was this weird juxtaposition of civic pride and often grim reality,’ Paul Dutton, then the Journal’s Sunderland reporter, recalled. ‘Sunderland was trying to be upwardly mobile – “Look we have city status, look we have a Nissan car factory” – but, at the same time, there was a backlash over plans to build a university ...”

“... in the next few months, I found myself at another Meeting of the Waters, on the Outer Banks, off North Carolina, and near yet another, at Springbrook, in a temperate Queensland rainforest, seven miles from where I was staying, along a leech-infested path. I gave that one a miss. I had already collected more than a hundred places which were known, or had once ...”

“... of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it one of the world’s largest 50 private corporations). The young Moon seems to have been an ordinary enough peasant child until, at ...”

“... expansion into the Crimea and most of present-day Ukraine had been paralleled, further north, by the partition of Poland after a series of agreements between Russia, Austria and Prussia. These agreements were possible, in large part, because of the disruption of European diplomacy caused by bitter Anglo-French discord. During the Crimean War, there ...”

“... Fellows of Harvard College and the companion case Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court of the United States outlawed racial ‘affirmative action’ as it has been practised at institutions of higher education in America since the 1970s. Affirmative action gives a boost to certain categories of applicant for ...”

“... essay about learning to use a sextant. First he determines the latitude and longitude of his North Kensington flat, then buys a boat. His account of the working of the instrument is absolutely his own yet he probably couldn’t have done it had not Kipling shown him how. It should be clear from this that Raban is never guilty of supposing that he can use ...”

“... What use was selective pressure for the evolution of an instinct to fly south in the autumn and north in the spring before the evolution of navigation? What use would the evolution of an instinct for navigation by the stars have been to African birds before the evolution of an instinct to seek better feeding grounds in Northern Europe in the summer? How ...”

“... to such a queer sense of authority and religious cheek. Strange marvellous black nights of the north Midlands, with the gas-light hissing in the chapel, and the roaring of the strong-voiced colliers. Popular religion: a religion of self-glorification and power, forever! and of darkness. No wailing ‘Lead kindly Light’ about it. Or this, which the ...”

“... matters have been improving. In 1980, there was even a small surplus, only partly owing to North Sea oil. As for food prices, 90 per cent of the rise since 1973 is due to Western inflation and soaring energy prices. What’s hit the British economy is not Community membership, but world slump. It would be worse outside. So, patiently, the Community’s ...”

“... our last conversation, I often find myself nostalgically drifting back to West Parade. The hellish North Sea wind tore through the third-floor apartment every day and I thought: wonderful, only lunatics would attend a university in Norwich. We had one of those rusted paraffin heaters, a huge, clanging metal beast with German markings that defeated its intended ...”

“... local opposition. Walter Gropius gathered an extraordinary group around him: Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy. The Bauhaus had its internal divisions and idiosyncrasies, but the six years it was located in Weimar were some of its most successful. In August and September 1923, a large ...”

“... Democratic Unionist Party, Jeffrey Donaldson, instructed the first minister of Northern Ireland, Paul Givan, to resign. This automatically also removed the deputy first minister, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, from office, effectively bringing about the collapse of the power-sharing administration. Donaldson claimed to be protesting at the failure of the ...”

“... opposition, it was this fear that drove a motley crew of deputies – including Bertrand Barère, Paul Barras, Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, Lazare Carnot and Jean-Lambert Tallien – to topple him. They did so by means of a hasty coup on 9 Thermidor, the day after his speech. The key events are well known. Robespierre’s ...”

“... those who suggest that it falls a long way below international terrorism of the al-Qaida variety, North Korea, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Indo/Pakistan arms race, Southern Africa, international crime (including the drugs against which Mr Blair declared war before he did so on terrorism) and conservation of the environment. We are still involved in ...”