“... has a longer reach than the Longman, which for copyright reasons is not yet available outside North America. Yet, like Heaney’s subtly ‘Hiberno-English’ translation of Beowulf, the Norton has never abandoned its roots. The footnotes translating ‘rounders’ as ‘baseball’ might once have limited the anthology’s sphere of influence, but ...”

“... little man, with a staccato, military manner’, according to the historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen. He spent his life championing Freud, but even Freud described him as ‘a disagreeable person, who wants to display himself in ruling, angering and agitating’, and referred to him once as ‘the liar from Wales’. Still, it’s possible that it ...”

“... by learning the details of female circumcision? In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world – a way that may be incomprehensible without the language. Kant’s a prioris, structures of the human mind, were replaced by structures of ...”

“... British Academy when the Penguin and Oxford anthologies of English verse edited respectively by Paul Keegan and Christopher Ricks appeared. Like their predecessors, they exclude most of the Middle Ages; feature no work (even in translation) from Latin, Old English or French; and co-opt Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since the ...”

“... galumphing effort in the style of Mexican muralism, in which a supersized proletarian overturns St Paul’s Cathedral on one side and the Houses of Parliament on the other, while Lenin, William Morris, Marx, Engels, Robert Owen and a multitude of workers look on in approval.The pedigree of the mural was impeccable – Hastings painted it with the assistance of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”