“... 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 ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... leprechauns spin on their pointed hats, he inserts the scholarly reservation: ‘but only in the north-eastern counties’. Is Yeats here sending up the reader, the folklorists, or mocking his own relentlessly mythopoeic mind? Or is he sending up nobody at all? A poet who literally lives in one of his own symbols, a half-ruined tower in County Galway, is ...”

“... 1773, after a 13-month voyage from Britain, the sloops Resolution and Adventure arrived on the north coast of Tahiti. For some on board, including their captain, James Cook, this was a return visit to the Pacific haven they called ‘King George’s Island’. The British were there, among other reasons, to check the performance of a small jewelled ...”

“... the manuscript was copied in a dialect of Middle English specific to the South-East Cheshire and North-East Staffordshire border. (The poet’s dialect is thought to be from a little further south.) This North-West Midlands version of Middle English is a different lexical cocktail to Chaucer’s London English. Chaucer’s ...”

“... to be the remains of James Hanratty had been packed into a coffin at Bedford prison and brought to North London. Capital punishment had been abolished the previous year. The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, had decreed that convicted murderers, whose bodies had by ancient barbarian law been consigned to quicklime in the prison yard, could be buried in consecrated ...”

“... and excitement of research than Julia Blackburn’s account of her attempt to find out about John Craske. Detail from Craske’s ‘The Evacuation of Dunkirk’ She first hears about him from her friend Emily, who told her: ‘He was a fisherman who became a painter and embroiderer … I think he’s much better than Alfred Wallis down in ...”

“... on reality – must be like Wordsworth’s experience of two consciousnesses, or like the turn, as John Sturrock describes it in The Language of Autobiography, that occurs when the autobiographer sees their written self suddenly cohere. The place condenses into the image; nothing more can be seen now. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s ‘Montague Street in ...”

“... of the whole Peninsula which American military forces aimed to achieve when they ventured north of the 38th Parallel. Moreover, we entered the Korean and Vietnam Wars without the kind of public debate that prepared Congressional and mass opinion for national sacrifice and made World Wars One and Two popular crusades. In this respect, however, Korea ...”

“... familiar, signalled the historic emergence of a new social type: the creole (créole, criollo) of North, Central and South America, the Caribbean, South and East Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places. It is these creoles, ‘colonials’ as opposed to the ‘colonised’, who form the subjects of Canny and Pagden’s intelligent new ...”

“... and that, for the past two centuries, these have been systematically played down by European and North American historians. ‘Afrocentrism’ has also become attached to a much older intellectual tradition among American blacks – and originally among white abolitionists, too – dating back to the early 19th century. This saw the culture of Ancient Egypt ...”

“... social democracy and what Americans call liberalism has been the dominant political creed of the North Atlantic world. Its achievements have been enormous. As Ralf Dahrendorf points out in his important and persuasive pamphlet, ‘After Social Democracy’,* ‘it has turned the empty promise of freedom of contract into effective citizenship rights; the ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”