“... bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in ...”

“... this mood, which contrasted strongly with the social documentaries produced in the 1930s by John Grierson, who subordinated questions of aesthetics to the dispassionate recording of reality. Marker disavowed cinéma vérité, describing his own documentary style as ‘ciné, ma vérité’; he makes no attempt to erase his own presence. Le Joli ...”

“... travel for ‘ladies’). This absence is exacerbated in the recent reprints, which have retained John Craxton’s characteristic cover designs, but omitted the arresting black and white photographs taken by Joan that were included in the first editions. Despite all this, Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh ...”

“... of mental vigour and resolve to overcome obstacles, which is indispensable to successful war.’ John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, recorded that ‘Churchill tried his hardest to elicit the general’s views and was met with the silence of shyness,’ while Wavell thought Churchill’s tactical ideas had got stuck somewhere around the time of the Boer ...”

“... 1581, and then a number of letters – business letters, essentially – to his half-brother Sir John Gilbert about privateering, shipping and local matters. There is nothing about the Virginia (Roanoke) Plantation, his rise at Court in the 1580s, or his intellectual activities. Only in his correspondence with Sir Robert Cecil in the 1590s do the letters ...”

“... his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by Sir John Seeley and his followers and William Cunningham’s brand of Christian Conservatism. The discussion of Baldwin’s youth is professedly intended by Williamson to exhibit a ‘model of how examination of an interwar politician’s early life can genuinely and ...”

“... of Amherst’, dressed in that distinctive ghost-white dress, which features in the movie Being John Malkovich. A hitherto ‘unknown’ photograph of Dickinson recently advertised on E-Bay, the Internet auction site. Shady dealings in allegedly ‘new’ poems by Dickinson – discovered, authenticated, sold and discredited. I recently received a flyer ...”

“... US for assistance and feel betrayed when it fails to arrive. ‘Liberia is small America,’ says John Dahn, one of thousands of people who took refuge in Monrovia’s main sports stadium during the recent fighting. ‘Whenever we have problems we call on America to help.’ Liberia’s colonial experience is both more contemporary and more intimate than that ...”

“... a marauding Danish general, kicked his head around in triumph. Conversely, the public hanging of John Platts outside Derby County Jail in April 1847 drew a crowd of twenty thousand – descendants of the ‘seething mob’ that played Shrove Tuesday football. When the FA was founded in 1863 it knew it was in direct competition for crowd support with public ...”

“... but of African Americans as well. Making Americans takes issue on several crucial points with John Higham’s classic Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955). Higham drew a sharp distinction between racism and nativism, which King’s account tends to blur. ‘Racism and nativism were different things,’ Higham has recently ...”

“... Azores only confirmed this picture of the inhabited world surrounded by a dusting of islands; when John Cabot landed on the Labrador coast in 1497 and Pedro Alvares Cabral made it to Brazil in 1500, they also declared their discoveries to be islands. The kind of map best suited to sailing around the oecumene was the portolano, which began as a listing of ...”

“... passages is where she describes how she used to bore Home Secretaries with her official briefings. John Major once told her to leave because he found himself dropping off; Michael Howard used to ‘rock and lurch in his chair’ to try to keep awake; and Douglas Hurd’s technique was to ‘sink far down into his chair and hood his eyes so you could not tell ...”

“... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As for Gangs of New York’s ...”

“... Guccione in 1983, that she found her voice, and perhaps, her ease with burning bridges. Sir John Junor, who had been editing the Sunday Express for thirty years when I joined, maintained that you could not be sued for libel if you framed something as a question … Thus I could ask my old boss … if he was connected with the Mafia, and put the question ...”

“... is bad enough. But according to one of the world’s most influential climate scientists, John Schellnhuber, ‘the difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.’ Thanks to the global paralysis since 1992, the ‘window of opportunity’ for reducing emissions fast enough to avoid this scenario is starting to look more like a crack ...”