“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mainly about money. After the Revolution, he considers escaping his expensive fame by heading north, perhaps as far as Canada. When his mother asks for 15 guineas, he blows up: ‘It is really hard upon me when you have taken everything you wanted from the plantation.’ And worse: ‘I have paid . . . by my own account fifty odd pounds out of my own ...”

“... movement of soldiers and refugees has exacerbated domestic tensions. Ituri lies in the north-east of Congo, bordering Uganda. It was the site of lucrative gold deposits, to which the Belgians were drawn as early as 1903. In time, other natural resources, from diamonds to coltan and tropical timber, brought a flood of fortune-seekers to ...”

“... republic in place of the capitalist one that had entrenched itself after the War of Independence. North of the border, it was harder to articulate a leftist-republican project. Connolly had concluded Labour in Irish History with the hope that ‘the pressure of a common exploitation can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class; earnest ...”

“... politician and Baptist minister born into a slave-holding family in the Confederate state of North Carolina three years into the Civil War, was enraged by the success of a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His response was to write a quasi-autobiographical novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902), which was both a ...”

“... social and economic cohesion, threatened with internal tribal strife and external attack from the north, but lacking in funds and forces to maintain adequate security services, an independent Kenya presents the least hopeful prospect of all the Colonial territories to which we have given or contemplate giving independence. Yet as Kyle astutely points ...”

“... the cloak-and-pipe fellow who was dropped for the Earl of Essex. His other colonial fiasco (the North Carolina settlement which vanished without trace in 1586) is only slightly more remembered. Britain was never seriously to colonise South America, and there never was an El Dorado in the form Ralegh sought. But his reckless, unpopular, foreigner’s sort of ...”

“... John​ is one of more than 250,000 people in Britain living under the supervision of the probation service. He got out of prison in April 2018, when his sentence still had some years to run. I met him while I was reporting on the shortcomings of the law on joint enterprise. In 2005 he had been convicted for murder after a man died as a result of injuries received during a burglary John was involved in – injuries John did not inflict ...”

“... have seemed to “hold the Moon and Stars in fee” ’. The Romantic imagination took up the Far North and South, its impossibilities, its auroras, its uncanny stillness, its palatial icebergs, and turned them into dreamstuff. When Ishmael, in a kind of homage to The Ancient Mariner, looks into the ‘inexpressible, strange’ eyes of an albatross caught on ...”