“... a crumbling gravestone, with a name and a date – 1813 – still legible, probably the furthest-north relic left by any exiled Highlander. This is a rambling book, in the best of both senses. It is wayward, discursive, sharing the true incoherence of history – that of the poor, at any rate. Its author’s simple tactic was to ‘follow the ...”

“... to Northern youth. By the mid-Sixties Jamaican sound systems in South London, Birmingham and the North of England were playing the bluebeat and ska records that marked the ripening of reggae. In 1964, while rock ‘n’ roll, soul, rhythm and blues, and beat music were mutating into vying forms, and laying down roots in British cities, Brian Epstein had ...”

“... Wheeler as ‘a bore in the colonial fashion’, though not one he disliked. Coming off the North Col of Everest in 1921 in dire conditions, he saved Wheeler’s feet from frostbite; Wheeler claimed that this saved his life. Davis himself is Canadian, and the book is dedicated to his grandfather, who served in the Great War. Some of its best passages ...”

“... striking despite the better housing and the theme park the Steinways built for them on the north shore of Queens. ‘New York remains New York,’ one of the Steinways said, ‘and that means a city where democracy called by its true name is the rule of the mob … Heaven help those who by expressing republican sentiment may provoke the rage of the ...”

“... a prelude to independence. In the 18th century, he points out, colonists throughout British North America were drawing closer to the mother country, not further away. They ‘rejoiced in the British constitution’, celebrated military victories over France and idealised the king as their champion against Catholic enemies. Economically, too, they became ...”

“... about mastibation’. After this disgrace – deeply shocking to his family, who were stern North Staffordshire Methodists – he was despatched to a Children’s Home on the Lancashire moors, arriving in a blizzard as wild and dramatic as the storm in the opening pages of Oliver Twist. But the Children’s Home, though rigorous and bleak, was a good ...”

“... of overdrinking.’ Ah, yes, you guessed! This is your younger self speaking. And this is John Fowles, 1949-65: 250,000 words of adolescent whining, groaning, anomie, enthusing about Antonioni films and wishing he were somewhere else, with more glamorous people, doing more glamorous things. A marathon of ...”

“... The institution has in fact often changed identity. It began by being British but took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord ...”

“... the death of her husband she spent most of a decade abroad (a good deal of it as a teacher in North American universities) chanting over to herself with satisfaction: ‘I’m no longer in New Zealand.’ What these writers gained from being New Zealanders, I think, was the same in each case – the lack of any profoundly etched social identity, so that ...”

“... area of social dereliction. None could have gained their 19th-century flavour without coal. John Shaw’s book is a careful reference work of value to all in research on local economic development or on particular industries. It has a sound appreciation of early technology. Its maps show the concentration of Scottish industry in the early days of ...”

“... senior thesis at Reed College in faraway Oregon and in graduate school at Duke in not much closer North Carolina. In 1982 he published Death in a Promised Land, a pioneering account that remains the starting point for anyone learning about the massacre. The work did not gain a large readership, though Ellsworth tells us that it was among the books most ...”

“... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...”

“... group founded by David Rockefeller to bring together policymakers, academics and journalists from North America, Western Europe and Japan – put out a controversial report in 1975 titled The Crisis of Democracy, which argued that an overload of welfare responsibilities was enervating democratic states. In much of Latin America military strongmen – Generals ...”

“... and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the ...”

“... Wagner-Martin, a highly respected scholar of American literature who teaches at the University of North Carolina, was bewildered by the hostile reception in Britain of her biography of Sylvia Plath, published in 1987. Not only had she run into major conflicts with the Plath estate, she explains in her preface to Telling Women’s Lives, but some critics saw ...”