“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the bin, half that time in a closed ward: ‘Art has led me to the psychiatric department of the North London Royal.’ Lithium has tamed him, but he cannot take care of himself. He lives in Camden in squalor. Fenchurch is brought ‘home’ to Yorkshire by a daughter of his first marriage. ‘Home’ is another recurrent element in Storey’s work, and the ...”

“... and that it exposes the United Kingdom to gratuitous military risk, but that membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is politically desirable and may even make a real contribution to the defensibility of these Isles. The first of these is a markedly simpler matter than the other two. The arguments in favour of an independent British nuclear ...”