“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cult classic – written outside contemporary academic protocols, a throwback to something like John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu or Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (an influence Howe acknowledges). It’s an unorthodox close reading of ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’, which encompasses, among other things, the American Civil ...”

“... is about such businesses. In the 1980s, waste became a national export across much of the global North. Since then, firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. At first, the focus of this business was hazardous waste like asbestos or paint sludge. In countries like the US it cost as much as $250 per tonne to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Most of the great positive evils of the world,’ John Stuart Mill asserted in 1863, ‘are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced to within narrow limits.’ This sort of confidence in the reality and efficacy of progress now seems to set the 19th century distinctively apart from our own ...”

“... references to sanctuary comes in the Old Testament: six ‘cities of refuge’, from Kedesh in the north to Hebron in the south, are identified as places where those who had committed accidental manslaughter could escape blood vengeance. After a killer claimed sanctuary, he had to be put on trial and, if found innocent of intentional murder, returned without ...”

“... biographies and T.H. Huxley not so many fewer, yet Smith has been celebrated only by his nephew John Phillips in 1844 (Phillips was later to be a distinguished geological professor at Oxford). Since then, there has been a handful of scholarly articles by Joan Eyles, but otherwise Smith seems to have escaped the attention lavished on those who followed and ...”

“... course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could ...”

“... by an obscure one entirely because of its associational value. A small watercolour seascape by John Constable, though unfinished, trails clouds of reflected glory from the familiar Romantic landscapes and the atmospheric intensity of his big ‘six-footer’ canvases. If, however, paper analysis reveals it to be a work of the 1840s, probably by ...”

“... which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in Toledo – could be regarded as a practical way of encouraging solidarity, and perhaps it took no longer to complete than it took for the alliance to prepare its navy. The author claims that it was in the 17th century that ...”

“... by means of an outrageous and productive rifling of standard verse-forms like the aisling. John Montague, a poet much given to the perusal of the past, has a blunter, if no less telling method of setting out his historical material: a shattered procession of anonymous suffering files through the brain: burnt houses, pillaged farms, a province in ...”