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“... indelibly marked as it is by its historical and intellectual origins in the period of European and North American bourgeois hegemony which endured from the 17th century almost to the present day, can scarcely do justice to the diversity of institutional and cultural forms we see around us now, when the axis of global economic power is tilting away from the ...”

“... he a harsh landlord – a charge laid at times of Socialist agitation among the peasants of the North Italian plain? Another reason is that Verdi covered his tracks. His emotional life remains hedged off by his formidable reserve. Why did he live out of wedlock with Giuseppina Strepponi for so long at a time when to do so meant awkwardness and ...”

“... reached Europe from Africa in the Seventies and passed either from there or via the West Indies to North America. (Europe, by this account, is experiencing two waves of the epidemic simultaneously: an initial, statistically less significant one from Africa dating back to the Seventies and a second one brought over from America by gay men in the ...”

“... region disappearing offshore in the second half of the 1990s. The situation in the Middle East and North Africa is even worse, which helps to explain the chronic unemployment and social tension throughout the region. Earlier this year, Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa proposed an additional $25 billion in aid to Africa by 2010, a sum dwarfed by the amounts ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... Only Ireland gets a decent showing over the centuries – here, perhaps, the interests of the North American diaspora can be detected – and it is revealed for what it was: the model colony on whose pattern the entire Empire was based. India, too, is well catered for, but other parts of the Empire are treated more cavalierly. There is nothing about the ...”

“... 1000 kg bombs. ‘The blast from an 800 lb bomb,’ he wrote after studying damage at Tripoli in North Africa, ‘will frequently not even kill a fully-exposed rabbit at 100 ft. It certainly would not kill men at this distance.’ A scientist was on the way to establishing something the military had not considered: that there were limits to the effectiveness ...”

“... of Burmeister and Wain and the Motor Ship returned to mind when, researching the history of North Sea oil, I spent much of my time, troglodytic, in the cellar of the university library in Tübingen, working my way through back numbers of the Economist and the Financial Times, and various hefty monographs – usually in German – on offshore ...”

“... A relief, then, to turn from all this deranged big-talk to some sturdy English self-effacement. John Haffenden is steadily becoming the closest we have to a domestic version of the Mansos and Grobels. He has already published a book of earnest conversations with a dozen or so poets and this month he gives it a companion: Novelists in Interview.2 Plodding ...”

“... thick with smoke from fires 300 km away. The stench frightened us all day. In the mountains to the north and on the high plains to the north-east, there were fires along a 350 km front. The temperature was 44 °C; the winds were blowing at up to 100 km an hour. The land, with its extremes of fire, drought and flood – and ...”

“... citing the suggestion that for South Africans ‘the rugby scrum was symbolic of the laager,’ John Nauright and Timothy Chandler enter the reservation that ‘such notions can be taken too far.’ Indeed they can. An inward-facing huddle of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a ...”

“... the agenda for much of Italian national life, both public and private. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s famous encyclicals, Mater et magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), together with his summoning of the Second Vatican Council, produced great ferment in the Catholic world. But the radical tide ebbed, and the long and powerful pontificate of ...”

“... in 1492, and from the kingdom of Portugal in 1497. The experience of diaspora – initially in North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire – was traumatic. In Italy, the physician and writer Judah Abravanel, who had been separated from his young son, lamented: ‘Time with his pointed shafts has hit my heart/And split my gut, laid open my entrails,/Landed ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”