“... of foreign attack to justify new territorial acquisitions on the Subcontinent. In 1801 Tsar Paul ordered 20,000 Cossacks to ride south from Orenburg with the aim of beating Britain to some of it – though they had no maps for beyond the Oxus. This quixotic venture helped convince his courtiers that he had gone mad, triggering his assassination and the ...”

“... dark windows. Farrell’s folly seemed to be twinned with the other publishing conglomerate on the north side of the river: Random House. Marks modestly described his book as undernourished fiction, fiction buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the ...”

“... occasionally to be seen: reproductions on board of work by modern British painters – Ravilious, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Pasmore. These, I think, were put out by Shell and turn up occasionally nowadays at auction, though not quite at Sotheby’s. That I’ve always liked – and found no effort in liking – British paintings of the Forties and Fifties I ...”

“... or New Hampshire, which are ‘different’. I stifled the impulse to say that we were from the North and that the Confederacy was the enemy in the war we’d won, or that someone who wore the symbol of American white supremacy out in public perhaps deserved to ‘get jumped’. Though I’d read about Trump supporters shouting ‘Sieg heil!’ at his ...”

“... escape. Sontag was 15, wanted to move further away, and had to fight her mother to get that far north of Los Angeles. Her desires and capabilities were not usual, perhaps, for a teenage girl in a repressive era, and she was impressively ‘lucid’ (a favourite word) about them – all of them. ‘I feel that I have lesbian tendencies.’ This was shortly ...”

“... in the port of Bar, put in speedboats that reached Italy in under two hours, and then driven north, unstamped and untaxed. (In 2000 the EU filed a civil lawsuit in the US against the two companies, alleging that they ‘facilitated the smuggling of cigarettes illegally’ into the EU. Philip Morris agreed to pay $1.25 billion in an out-of-court ...”

“... 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 ...”