“... led to. To declare yourself a semiotician is to post an affiliation with the alternative and rival North American tradition of sign-study which descends from the logician and polymath C.S. Peirce. Semiology and semiotics have diverged to the point, it is said, of incompatibility: if this is so, it is deplorable, given how little headway they have managed to ...”

“... in LA City or County. After much haggling, the site for the trial was eventually moved far north to Simi Valley in Ventura County. Ventura has a less than 2 per cent black population and the lowest crime rate in Southern California. It is a white flight enclave which coincidentally attracts many retired policemen. The Rodney King four would be tried by ...”

“... considers the Americas as a connected whole, and is unusual in pursuing the relationships between North and Central America without anti-colonialist animus or righteousness. The sense of geography is the best thing about the book, the ‘bilocation’ of María’s adolescent religious fantasy becoming the novel’s narrative method. María emigrates to the ...”

“... had starved to death in every village.’ The economist Hu Angang spent seven years on the north-east border with Siberia, and as a driller in a prospecting team in northern China. He often travelled to remote villages in mountainous areas: Witnessing their absolute poverty, I became acutely conscious of the degree of China’s backwardness, and was ...”

“... On Guy Fawkes Day 1665, Samuel Pepys paid a visit to John Evelyn, his fellow diarist, administrative colleague and lifelong friend. Evelyn had an astonishing range of interests, from numismatics to town planning. He also possessed the leisure in which to pursue them, thanks to a family fortune founded on manufacturing gunpowder for Elizabeth I ...”

“... York, the Catalan artist Francesc Torres was two blocks from the WTC when the first jet struck the north tower, and he witnessed the collapse of both buildings from his studio rooftop ten blocks away. Commissioned by the 9/11 Museum, Torres photographed the 80,000 square-foot interior of the hangar every day in April 2009. His pictures, which proceed from ...”

“... all, association football. So it is not surprising that what are generally accepted as the major North American contributions to the high culture of our century are rooted in popular and – the US being what it is – commercial entertainment: films and the music shaped by jazz. There is a notable difference between Hollywood and Forty-Second ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if that philosophy had been proposed by a ...”

“... Do we really need or want to be told about life’s beauties and terrors by a couple of smart-arse North American young men? Would the truth be any easier to handle from the traditional wise old bird? Miss Wyoming is neither Coupland’s best work – that would be Girlfriend in a Coma, bits of Microserfs (1995), Generation X – nor by any means his worst ...”

“... other historical documents. Probably inspired by Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), and by John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer in the same year as well as the first two volumes of his USA trilogy (1930 and 1932), it was written at a time when there was a preoccupation with telling the ‘American story’ and the conviction that some kind of ...”

“... no difficulty imagining that I was imprisoned with my ladies-in-waiting in a damp castle in the North of England, depressed and stripped of all my power, with only memories to treasure. Unlike Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those ...”

“... anecdotes of heroic patriotism, Scouting for Boys is packed with advice about how to find north without a compass, tie a clove hitch, cut down a tree, build a camp fire, bake bread, distinguish a wagtail from a woodpecker or a sycamore from a spanish chestnut, track anything from an emu to a bicycle ‘on a hard macadam road’, fly the Union flag the ...”

“... But this was no ordinary liquidation. With estates in Campania, Sicily, France, Spain, Britain and North Africa, their teenage marriage had joined two of the wealthiest dynasties in the western Mediterranean. The early deaths of two children only strengthened their resolve to become chaste. Outright rejection of family life was followed by the deliberate ...”

“... bursaries, but his advisers also wanted evidence of skill. One of them, however, suggested he see John Reed. Reed was a solicitor, interested in Modernism. He lived with his wife Sunday in a house called Heide, in Heidelberg, a semi-rural community outside Melbourne – it had given its name to the Heidelberg School of Australian painters in the late 19th ...”

“... complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes – of the Scholes-Black equation – and the man with whom Scholes shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Merton, to be directors and co-founders of his new hedge fund Long-Term Capital ...”