“... 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 ...”

“... of Ossetians – Indo-Iranian in ethnic origin – live in Russia, in the autonomous republic of North Ossetia; according to the 1989 Soviet census, Ossetians formed 66 per cent of South Ossetia’s population, with Georgians accounting for 29 per cent. The two communities have lived alongside each other, and intermarried, for centuries. As the nationalist ...”

“... of us don’t know what to look for, however, and the aerial view is alien to our sense of scale. John Wise, the pioneering American aeronaut, thought he was looking at a waterfall in a pleasure-garden when he saw Niagara Falls from space. ‘I was disappointed, for my mind had been bent on a soliloquy on Niagara’s raging grandeur … The little frothy ...”

“... design for the Canadian Estate at Bulford. Two birds with one stone: the A303 should be diverted north just west of Parkhouse crossroads (the site of the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985, when police from Wiltshire and five adjacent sties plus troops in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to Stonehenge: there is no ...”

“... diminished. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), a pivotal Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indians had a ‘right of occupancy’, but were not full owners of their land as whites understood it. Nonetheless, to the end of the 19th century, even as the federal government forcibly expelled Indians from the eastern half of the ...”

“... is based on a walk through the Lairig Ghru, the finest of British mountain passes, from Deeside north to Speyside. You might have thought that the terrain would be allowed to come into its own here: the huge massifs of Braeriach and Ben Macdhui louring above the path, with the promised land of river meadows and white houses glowing in the vee of the col ...”

“... extraordinary Chinese dairy at Woburn, approached through massed azaleas and rhododendrons, and of John Nash’s elegant gallery in Regent Street with its models and plaster casts – two other buildings that no longer survive. When Pückler retells stories told him by others we begin to suspect that some scepticism might have been appropriate. At ...”

“... in the wings. But commentators are all on the back foot. We might argue that having trained in the north, Caravaggio learned artistic manners brasher than those with which his central Italian contemporaries felt comfortable, and that Counter-Reformation ideologues approved of this trenchant approach. It is hard, however, to find textual correlatives for the ...”

“... management. But the discovery of oil – ‘Scotland’s Oil’, as the SNP put it – in the North Sea, anxiety about Britain’s industrial decline and the sudden Middle East oil price hike after the Yom Kippur war of 1973 meant that nationalist economics no longer seemed so daft or unworldly. The energy crisis contributed to political instability at ...”

“... in Lords of the Lebanese Marches, based on field work he conducted in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its multiple refractions through violence and narrative, joking and play, a world where status and power are organised ...”

“... the Arctic coast of Alaska to the Rideau River in eastern Ontario to the Hartland Peninsula on the north coast of Devon to Kojarena in Western Australia to the Waihopai Valley on New Zealand’s South Island. An NSA analyst sitting in an office in Fort Meade, Maryland, receives signals from radio interception antennae in Tangimoana and taps on subsea internet ...”

“... Peat-cutting​ on the island of North Uist usually begins in mid-April, but the exact timing varies. One old crofter used to say that you should only start cutting when the yellow flag iris comes into flower because by then the oils in the bog will have risen, but not everyone waits that long. It might mean cutting too late, and then the peats won’t dry ...”

“... as he mockingly put it. He was one year old when his naval officer father was killed in the North Sea in October 1916, a death which meant that from then on the boy and his mother would be hard up. His mother’s was much the grander of the two families, her father having risen to be a colonial governor in French West Africa. On that side there was ...”

“... half of the 20th century, such as Benavente, Unamuno or Alberti, remain unknown, as playwrights, north of the Pyrenees; and no Spanish dramatist since the Civil War has produced anything even remotely comparable to El público (‘The Audience’ or ‘The Public’), Once Five Years Pass, Don Perlimplín, Doña Rosita the Spinster, Blood Wedding, Yerma or ...”