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“... of US history, which leaves the impression that the country’s territorial expansion on the North American continent took place largely through peaceful settlement and the purchase of land, Anderson and Cayton emphasise the centrality of military conquest. They are nothing if not ambitious. Their aim in The Dominion of War is to dismantle what they call ...”

“... no memory of my father, who was a local historian, talking or writing about it. The landscape of north Wexford, where I was born, is dotted with memorials to 1798, but there is nothing, as far as I know, at Scullabogue. Its memory was erased from what a child could learn about 1798. It was a complication in our glorious past, and it was essential for our ...”

“... experiments; and confronted with residential apartheid and job discrimination as they moved North. A falsification that held more universal sway among whites than did any Stalinist rewriting of history in the Soviet Union transformed black Americans in the post-bellum South from victims of re-subjugation into political and sexual predators. A century ...”

“... Cheered on by the Tory faithful, John Major recently dismissed as ‘claptrap’ a letter signed by 500 university teachers of English attacking the proposed revisions to the National Curriculum. The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel ...”

“... gigantic versions of amorously phallic flutes’ (we shall meet the flute-sized ones in the St John Passion). Via the Greeks our multi-cultural author arrives at what he calls ‘an event presumed to exist in historical time – the Crucifixion of Christ’. Why presumed? Did it happen or not? Perhaps the query is irrelevant in a historical context ...”

“... guardsmen and their horses in the royal parks. A missile fired from a truck and narrowly missing John Major’s cabinet in Downing Street was met with astonishment as much as alarm. The IRA had come to learn that one bomb in London had more impact than ten in Northern Ireland. Yet since it concentrated on commercial targets in the City, where its attacks had ...”

“... reported his findings to the president and his officials, including the White House counsel, John Dean. As 1972 was an election year, the strategy of the White House focused on containment. In the short term, at least, the president’s men were successful. The break-in did not become a big story. On 19 June Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, called ...”

“... Henry II, Roland is recorded in several medieval registers as holding substantial tracts of land north of Ipswich. His yearly service to the king, at least as it has come down to us, was ‘saltum, siflum et pettum’: a jump, a whistle and a fart.Roland fits poorly with the image of medieval minstrels that later took hold. In the 18th and 19th centuries ...”

“... de Saint-Mémin, a local aristocrat who, having earned his living making profile portraits in North America, was appointed director of the city’s art academy by the restored Bourbons. Although now incorporated within a much larger museum complex, it may claim to be the earliest, as well as the most spectacular, surviving museum devoted to the art of the ...”

“... The painter​ Gwen John suffered from jealousy in her relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She was 27 when she started to model for him. He was 63. Rodin slept with a lot of women during his lifetime and the women he slept with also posed for him. John was jealous of Rodin’s other women ...”

“... as party leader also felt constrained to observe the Home Rule commitments of his predecessor, John Smith. Of course, once devolution had been achieved, matters were simpler: as members of a UK-wide party, Labour politicians in the new Scottish Parliament were expected to follow the party line dictated by Blair from London, notwithstanding the supposed ...”

“... removed it seems from today’s Britain, where every other person on the high street is wearing a North Face weatherproof jacket, even out shopping. One fine morning in August 1956, the Meades family sets off to climb Snowdon. His mother sighs at their lack of waterproof coats but Jonathan and his father, along with many of the others out for a walk that ...”

“... kind of thing. Is there any greater possibility of present-day conditions in Western Europe and North America fostering the rise of a ‘Modern Prince’? Perhaps there is. However, the reader can come away from all three of these Euro-communist treatises without the slightest notion of why, or how, in any concrete sense. They remain encamped upon that ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big and jaundiced (and ugly),’ Archie Randolph Ammons wrote, ‘on ...”