“... of accents, while dated, bring into earshot a teeming cast of characters – East Enders, posh North Londoners, Italian immigrants and so on.As a child Gilroy was considered ‘sickly’, and at the age of two was given over to the care of her maternal grandparents, who lived in the region of Berbice, looking across the Corentyne estuary towards Dutch ...”

“... reason, marauding refugee bands of ‘warrior-cultists’ moved more than a thousand miles north into the Chaco Canyon region, following civil strife in the Toltec Empire. They brought with them the cult of the Feathered Serpent and its associated practices of cannibalistic sacrifice, which they used as an instrument of intimidation to impose ...”

“... If anyone could bring us close to the mystery of Genghis Khan’s achievements, it was the late Paul Ratchnevsky. Not only had he been instructed in all the relevant languages by Paul Pelliot, the outstanding figure in the heroic age of French scholarship on Asia, but he had specialised in the laws and customs of the ...”

“... Killip was diverted for a second time, by the work of Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, August Sander and Paul Strand.He returned home, worked in his parents’ pub and began documenting a place that was still, via Dublin and Liverpool, a popular holiday destination. There are no tourists in Killip’s early images, no sign of the annual TT races that he would later ...”

“... Paul Theroux is the author of The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express. He is better-known for these than for his nine novels. The novels are extraordinarily different from each other, and haven’t given a distinct image of Theroux as a novelist. He has set them in Kenya, Malawi, Singapore, London, Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel ...”

“... done that after all. Instead she gave a tasty story about gun-running between the South and North of Ireland. By the afternoon a commander (Huntly) and a chief superintendent (Nevill) were up from London again to ask her about a bomb at Euston Station in September 1973. Oh, she said, she hadn’t planted that, but she had delivered the bombs for ...”

“... vote was quickly extended to the majority of British men, and he started his political life as North-East organiser and agitator for the Social Democratic Federation. It was cruel work, and he found the narrow, sectarian approach of the SDF unconvincing and unattractive. Before long he was on his way south to take part in the event which shaped the rest of ...”

“... and Britain. When complaints were made about Saddam’s genocidal attacks on the Kurdish people in north Iraq, critical UN Resolutions were watered down by the US, and formal British government protests were suitably muted. When an Iraqi missile accidentally hit an American warship killing 38 people, the US Government immediately sympathised with ...”

“... Of his third marriage (his first two wives died), Mr Jay remarks waspishly that, while in North America, ‘he took his pick of the choice American marriage market.’ But from another angle Mr Jay finds Chamberlain sympathetic and admirable. He applies to him a phrase of Hegel on the subject of great historical figures: ‘They were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is not difficult since the greatest of these murals are in Parisian churches.Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff, is a five-minute walk from the Gare du Nord (also by Hittorff). It was consecrated in 1844 and, because Hittorff was an authority on the use of colour in ancient temples, was intended to have a polychrome interior. In ...”

“... Goebbels’s Deutecher Kunstbericht had appeared in 1933 and discredited artists like Otto Dix and Paul Klee had already been removed from teaching posts at German academies. The new decree formalised the persecution of the avant-garde movement in art. Around sixteen thousand works of art were confiscated from public collections. Six hundred and fifty or so ...”

“... Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started ...”

“... and Hitler, whose world-shaking career of war, genocide and destruction lasted a mere 12 years. Paul Preston’s massive biography, on which he has worked for many years, is not, he writes in his Prologue, ‘a history a 20th-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man’. Franco was born and raised ...”

“... Paul Fussell’s 34 essays were written in different moods and time-zones for different British and American journals, between 1967 and 1982. Some are boyishly truculent, politically partisan, denouncing wrong-headed fellow Americans (so that the British reviewer whistles between his teeth, thinking: ‘They can’t be as bad as all that ...”