“... from the 1980s, when he found a larger readership during the travel-writing boom associated with Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. One reason for the improvement is that the journeys he made – through Brezhnev’s USSR for Among the Russians (1983) and Deng Xiaoping’s China for Behind the Wall (1987) – weren’t so easily romanticised: depressed by ...”

“... once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that ...”

“... followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to arrive at Harwich. I had never met anyone who had walked all the way from central London to the countryside – indeed, apart from my ten-year-old son, of whom more ...”

“... between $3000 and $5000 to a smuggler known as a coyote who guides the children on their journey north. The child travels from his or her home country to Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, then boards the northbound freight trains known as a single entity: La Bestia, ‘the beast’. The children face the physical dangers of sneaking on to moving ...”

“... Jakobson gives examples: a Lithuanian spell (‘May this sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu’) a North Russian incantation (‘Water, queen river, daybreak! Send grief beyond the blue sea, to the sea bottom, like a grey stone never to rise from the sea bottom, may grief never come to burden the light heart of God’s servant, may grief be removed and sink ...”

“... born in 1941 on a farm in Terrell County, Georgia, 150 miles south of Atlanta, but raised further north in Macon, a small, bustling city at the geographical centre of the state. Of the cotton fields but not from them, he was a sharecropper’s son who grew up in an early iteration of America’s inner-city projects, forming a gospel quartet with the ...”

“... for saying this, apparently endorsed by Chomsky and certainly held by anarchists like Robert Paul Wolff, is that coercion itself – the state’s big shtick – is never justified. The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it ...”

“... police, with a helping hand from Washington. He had travelled east to attend a peace conference in North Vietnam.Muammar Gaddafi was the last influential African leader to claim the mantle of Pan-Africanism and call for the creation of an African superstate. By the end of the 1970s, with his hopes for Pan-Arabism dashed, he was doubling down on Libyan ...”

“... counterparts their children were ‘fatter, larger and had better calves to their legs’. Further north, the Sami reindeer herders of Lapland offered a glimpse into the past. In the 18th century a tourist industry had developed around these hunter-gatherer ‘Lapps’, a Scandinavian safari complex that enabled Enlightenment intellectuals to gawk at a ...”

“... of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ...”

“... way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem into unlikely and unsettling places, and was already at odds ...”

“... on ‘white-collar crime’ by the late John Spencer, and an important critical essay by Paul Hirst on the inability of orthodox Marxism to theorise the joint-stock company. None of these interventions did much to ground their discussion in the developing realities of economic crime in Britain. This particular project was only taken up with any ...”

“... to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. But ‘berserkers’ did not appear till 1822, though by 1879 Edmund Gosse could call someone ‘a dangerous old literary bersark to the ...”

“... Watier’s, ‘stank’, he said, ‘of horse-dung and bad blacking’. Asked about a tour to the North, he enquired of his valet: ‘Which of the lakes do I admire?’ ‘Windermere, sir.’ ‘Ah yes – Windermere, so it is – Windermere.’ He was obsessed with cleanliness, spending two hours every morning on his ablutions, brushing his flesh with a ...”

“... her childhood in Sylhet, Bangladesh, a retired schoolteacher, still lives with her older sister in North Calcutta in a small rented flat. My father’s ancestral house languishes in Bangladesh and is at last, we hear, to be torn down; but he has been luckier than most other ‘refugees’ – he rose to a high position in the company he worked for, and bought ...”