“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with the premise that governs his book: that there were views from Indian Country of eastern North America which can be recovered by modern historians. Historians can, of course, construct a history of Indian/European colonial encounters, but the sources are overwhelmingly one-sided. There are European sources galore, and increasingly sophisticated ...”

“... But the victory was just as important for the gateways it opened to other parts of the world: North Africa and the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish were expanding their influence; the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, where the Portuguese were elbowing in on local trade; and Iran and Iraq, where the Shiite Safavid dynasty was establishing its ...”