“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”