“... of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets off a black revolution in the American South which leads to the formation of a socialist state, ultra-modern and prosperous, in contrast with the shabby private-enterprise North that limps along on the ...”

“... who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs Stevenson’s faded existence is not lost on him, and he does what he can for her ...”

“... be. He had plays on Broadway and in the West End, but when he returned to see his family in the North, his father would wonder exactly what his son did for a living. He was writing novels that caused him to be called the voice of his generation; writing plays for the Royal Court that changed people’s idea of what theatre was; winning the Booker Prize for ...”

“... The American philosopher John Dewey thought that democracy should be like a giant conversation: the nation talking to itself about its hopes and fears and listening to what other people have to say. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Dewey, he never got to hear what such a conversation might sound like, because the technology wasn’t available ...”

“... him by reading out inspirational bits of Frederick the Great. Carlyle has usually fared better in North America, where more respectable enthusiasts have never been scarce. He had enormous difficulty in getting a British publisher for Sartor Resartus, his first important book, written in 1831, and eventually settled for serial publication in Fraser’s ...”

“... civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books about the horrors of Marxism’. ‘At the moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ‘catering to the worst elements of commuter ...”

“... self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat here, he took a tram, he dined alone in the ‘white’ room. Look at his memorial, his Margate ...”

“... Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his predecessors became known as one of the new terrors of death, and whose Life of Mansfield contains at ...”

“... the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s ...”

“... The area bounded by Hyde Park to the west and Regent Street to the east, extending north to Oxford Street and south to Piccadilly, enclosed ‘more intelligence and ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty, than the world had ever collected in such a space before’. In the long summer months when he was confined to his Somerset parish at ...”

“... role in Nato, which is to keep Eastern Atlantic sealanes clear of submarines in order to protect North American reinforcements in case of war in Europe. For this purpose, Britain will retain three aircraft-carriers, although numbers of surface ships and submarines are to be cut. These large ships are very expensive and vulnerable and tie up a large number of ...”

“... in the excellent local bilingual monthly El Andar, it lives in the shadow of San Jose, one hour north: ‘Computer production has crept over Highway 17 into Scotts Valley, and in the last ten years housing projects have shot up on the north side of town, peopled by folks who come to Watsonville to sleep by the Pacific ...”

“... They are concentrated in the cities and more than two-thirds of them live in the Midlands, the North and Scotland. If conscience was the first spur to social reform, prudence was the second. Joseph Chamberlain famously asked in 1885: ‘What ransom will property pay for the security it enjoys?’ The English ruling classes have been more skilful than most ...”

“... is said to have caused a million deaths. Similar disasters happened a number of times on the North China plain, largely because the river had to carry an increased load of suspended sediment after the vegetation cover had been stripped from its middle reaches to make way for cultivation. In modern times the disruption of the infrastructure has become ...”

“... man-made climate change were widespread in the 18th century. Like their French counterparts to the north, the colonists of British North America were eager to find proof of the righteousness of their colonial project. The Harvard minister Samuel Williams went round New England collecting plant specimens, plunging ...”