“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... attended by hundreds. Thousands more, many of them former ‘Immaculate girls’, now part of the North American diaspora, watched online. The Franciscan Sisters earn deep respect for their lives of service: they are active across the island, teach at every level of education, seek to empower the poor and marginalised, and care deeply for one another in ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... covering the case of a teenage boy who had been beaten up by a policeman in Thurso, which is near John o’Groats. There was the most fearful hullabaloo based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”