“... 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 ...”

“... verse (from Anon on the structure of the cosmos – ‘as appel the eorthe is round’ – to John Updike on cosmic gall), is therefore fighting a lost battle. The editors make out a brave case for the similarity of poet and scientist (‘the starting-point for both of their activities is the imagination’), dispute old distinctions between ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... happy; it is a great experience, psychologically so interesting as to fill one’s thoughts.’ In North Africa during the Second World War his plane crashed on take-off at Algiers and burst into flames. Macmillan scrambled through the emergency exit, then went back into the burning plane to rescue a French flag lieutenant – a fact he doesn’t mention in ...”

“... sex or ability, they came and went when they chose, working-class mothers were admirably assisted. John Pounds, a crippled Portsmouth cobbler, ran one such, carrying on his trade while his pupils did the work he set them. A visitor suggested that he needed some new books – ‘those under that birdcage seem to be coming to pieces.’ Pounds: ‘So much the ...”

“... By the 1820s, a fifth or more of the world’s population, in Asia, Australasia, Africa, mainland North America, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean world, were in a position to describe themselves as ‘British subjects’, along with the miscellaneous inhabitants of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late ...”

“... summer 1853, as Clarke guesses, he was walking with Millais on a ‘beautiful moonlit night’ in North London when the young men were astonished by the vision of a ‘young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes’. She paused for a moment ‘in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on ...”

“... I’ve always associated the event with Napoleon.’ Suzy finally lands up in Ulysses Road, North London, co-habiting with another of Fran’s cast-off lovers, Jeremy, a Courtauld postgraduate. She gets pregnant (astonished by the fact that she should matter enough to be fertile) and they marry. But it doesn’t work. He batters her, she leaves with her ...”

“... of it, the side that makes Emmeline involve herself and her lover in a fatal accident on the Great North Road. And it is this dissolution into the primeval and inarticulate (she herself had a convulsive and never-conquered stammer) which ‘loosens the text’ for the modern theorist, ‘so that words and figural processes induce a hallucinatory logic ...”

“... more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than Thompson of Sunderland, however, was Auguste Comte, one of whose books ...”

“... his marriage in 1883 to Taytu Betul, which gave him the support of her influential kinsmen in the north. The acquisition in 1887 of the city of Harar, situated 300 miles east of Addis Ababa and formerly controlled by the Egyptians, finally provided Menelik with access to the coast and shifted the balance of power within the empire decisively towards his ...”

“... spoken in Normandy and Picardy, which came over with England’s conquerors. These regions were north of the Joret line, named after the 19th-century French linguist Charles Joret, and maintained a set of regional peculiarities that continue to echo in English today. Terms like ‘prey’ and ‘veil’ preserved ‘Normano-Picard’ vowel patterns rather ...”

“... Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... market town of Romford, to the village of Havering-atte-Bower, well off the beaten track to the north. One of Dr McIntosh’s greatest successes is in contrasting the development of the very different areas which made up the Liberty of Havering. The work that has gone into this study began, 28 years ago, as a PhD thesis on Havering’s most famous ...”