“... On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South ...”

“... force for Heaney at that time because of his own recent experience. His most controversial book, North, had appeared the previous summer. Several of its most striking poems grew from a fascination with the Iron Age bodies that had been exhumed from the peat bogs of Northern Europe: the subject became, as he later recollected, ‘a completely instinctive ...”

“... as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add ...”

“... his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new book is pitched at street-level. It asks to be called vivid, and often is – though, profligate of detail, Boyle can overplay the enchantment of objects: Volvos imported by ...”

“... appear as many multi­colour­ed shorelines woven into an undul­ating whole. A key floats in the North Sea (mark­ed here as ‘The German Ocean’), east of the Humber, displaying a cross-section of strata. Smith’s Strata Identified by Organised Fossils (1816) introduced his principle of faunal succession, which posits that the fossil types present in ...”

“... carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place. Pepys, who sat on the Navy Board, knew how expensive a replacement would be and hoped that its significance would fade with the memory of the war. In December 1663, however, ‘after it was forgot whose it was, or any ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... in a country whose media are perennially obsessed with a caricatured contrast between a rough North and a soft South. (Manchester likes to talk tough, but is in many ways a more bourgeois city than Birmingham.) Birmingham became prominent because of its industrial power, but its history is very different from that of the ‘industrial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”