“... what in the 1930s the American historian Herbert Bolton called ‘the epic of Greater America’. John Elliott’s long awaited book is just that. It not only fills an obvious gap – more like a chasm – but sets the pattern for a whole new historiography of the European colonial empires. As with all Elliott’s books, the architecture and the scope are ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... full of demands for it. But it is also most unlikely that the domineering minister of justice, John Vorster, would have left such a key decision to De Wet. Vorster was Van den Bergh’s boss and the two men were close. It seems far more likely that Vorster, probably after discussion with Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister, decided it would not be politic ...”

“... meeting of the leaders of the national, informal ‘Protestant Establishment’. It was chaired by John Foster Dulles, who a decade later would be named secretary of state by Eisenhower. The delegates proclaimed their identity as Americans, but were highly conscious of their independence. A resolution declaring that ‘the Church as such is not at war’ was ...”

“... being female is dispelled when you consider his book’s rugged hero, a McNabian squarehead called John Porter, former SAS man and now broken-backed vodka-guzzler under the arches of Vauxhall. All these men have a chance to thwart the Ruperts by fixing – via immense personal courage and a lot of guns and knives – the unfixable, getting in and out of ...”

“... were summoned to Washington for meetings with Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and John Negroponte. There was only one issue on the agenda: cross-border raids. Washington was determined to find Pakistani politicians who would defend them. The ANP leaders refused. ‘We told them physical intervention into the tribal areas by the United States ...”

“... shadow cast by the revolution. The novelist who explored this period with the greatest acuity was John McGahern, a writer who (contrary to Foster’s view) was intensely alive to the contradictions and compromises of Irish postmodernity. His last book, That They May Face the Rising Sun, is set in a time warp, the characters caught in a strange limbo between a ...”

“... be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have had the poet’s image in mind. Bramhall almost certainly did, taking Donne’s account of the conspiracy of the swordfish and the thresher fish against the ...”

“... have always been an integral part of the power game. Saviano says that his father ‘adored Pope John Paul II’ and was hugely impressed by the numbers who listened to him and the power this brought. ‘All the powerful kneeled before him. For my father this was enough to admire a man.’ With the sales of Gomorrah running into millions and its author ...”

“... or the content is ‘derived’ from something that is mental. ‘Underived’ content (to borrow John Searle’s term) is the mark of the mental; underived content is what minds and only minds have. Since the content of Otto’s notebook is derived (i.e. it’s derived from Otto’s thoughts and his intentions with a ‘t’), the intensionality of its ...”

“... had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald ...”

“... John Sayles’s film Lianna broke new ground in 1982 with its portrait of a young wife and mother who comes out as a lesbian. Equally ground-breaking was a scene early in the film in which Lianna’s husband, a philandering, self-obsessed academic, suggests that she have sex with him. Lianna looks at him with a mixture of indulgence and exasperation and says: ‘I’ll go put the thing in ...”

“... that there is but one God: and yesterday I ate him.’ Long before Arens’s radical doubts, Sir John Barrow reviewed (in the Quarterly Review for September 1836) a first-person account of the remnants of a cannibal feast. ‘Though we are not at all disposed to impeach Mr Earle’s veracity,’ Barrow wrote, ‘we should much like to have some clear ...”

“... more concerned about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was ...”