“... Soundtrack by ... Theremin, slide guitar and aeoliphone Messiaen and Ry Cooder The truth pours north I meant trucks Maquiladora sisal tin Box girders and columns Concrete cantilevers overhead flowing All the way to Minneapolis Heroin and mangoes Everything in the grass beginning to wake And bite It’s so dry A fine mist of particulates Settling in Feed ...”

“... among the fenlands and in the marshy ground of the Thames Valley, it claimed both James I and Oliver Cromwell. Theories about its origin have been legion: in the Middle Ages it was thought to be due to the action of planets and comets, to electrical storms or rains of ‘fever poison’; the Chinese thought it was caused by disharmony between Yin and ...”

“... prerogatives; the bargaining with the parliament of 1523; the administrative initiatives in the North and Wales. In all these instances Gwyn may be right. Yet when politicians repeat the policies of their predecessors they do so in altered circumstances and under fresh pressures. To be convinced by Gwyn’s account of the cardinal’s aims we would need a ...”

“... to overtake all of these in practical effectiveness, however, is the remarkable figure of Oliver Rackham, a throwback to earlier centuries in his solitary, single-minded endeavours made at the expense of an orthodox – and secure – career. Rackham’s achievement has been the more impressive in that he is a physicist by background and his ...”

“... that is, the descendants of the 388,746 enslaved people who disembarked in the region of North America that would become the United States. It represents their histories and culture as not only central to but exemplary of a singular national narrative – ‘a people’s journey, a nation’s story’ – the culmination of which is the establishment ...”

“... a professor of biology at the University of Sussex who was involved in the Krefeld study, and Oliver Milman, an environment correspondent at the Guardian, are both convinced that we can’t afford to wait for more facts to emerge. Their books cover much the same ground, though with different emphases. Both make the point that insects are an integral part ...”

“... counterparts their children were ‘fatter, larger and had better calves to their legs’. Further north, the Sami reindeer herders of Lapland offered a glimpse into the past. In the 18th century a tourist industry had developed around these hunter-gatherer ‘Lapps’, a Scandinavian safari complex that enabled Enlightenment intellectuals to gawk at a ...”

“... detachable panels to the measurements all round the room: detachable but designed to last, like Oliver Messel’s Venice, which adorned the same room in the Thirties, all striped poles and cotton-wool pigeons, and which remained until the Coq d’Or. Peter was considerate enough when obliterating what he referred to as the ‘Ghost-Ship’ on the end wall ...”

“... the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence ...”

“... Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King Oliver’; and the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel, which was a notable touring venue for musicians in the 1930s and was, when Fisher visited, being demolished. This was Fisher’s first visit to America. He was already fifty. His plane touched down at ...”

“... On 4 December 1655, Oliver Cromwell opened a conference summoned ‘to consider of proposals in behalf of the JEWS, by Menasseh ben Israel, an agent come to London in behalf of many of them, to live and trade here, and desiring to have free use of their synagogues’. This gathering of politicians, clergymen, lawyers and merchants, which is known to history as the Whitehall Conference, was invited to rescind the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290 ...”

“... imagination were still intact? I asked him to imagine entering one of our local squares from the north side, to walk through it, in imagination or in memory, and tell me the buildings he might pass as he walked. He listed the buldings on his right side, but none of those on his left. I then asked him to imagine entering the square from the south. Again he ...”

“... broadcasts on Radio Rome. The DTC was in Metato, a small town in a swathe of unremarkable farmland north of Pisa. Nowadays, from a couple of spots in the middle of nowhere you can look back across the plain to the Baptistry and the Leaning Tower, shimmering out of the Campo dei Miracoli. These views are the only evidence you’re likely to find that the camp ...”

“... Was this, for a start, the same Ayatollah as the one who had gone pimping with Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in order to arm the colonial mercenaries in Nicaragua who had been so eloquently opposed by Salman Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile? Or was it the other Ayatollah, the genial friend of Kurdistan? The ally of the women of Persia? Who but an effete ...”

“... the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it’s not Tom Clancy or Dan Brown either. He’s more like the Oliver Stone of American letters: crass, hectoring but passionately interested – and occasionally touched by genius. Charlotte Simmons resembles a very bad Oliver Stone film. Unfortunately, at 676 pages, it lasts considerably ...”