“... report of 1868, produced for Seward by the former Mississippi senator and ardent expansionist Robert J. Walker, suggested ‘the propriety of obtaining from the same power Greenland, and probably Iceland also’. Walker extolled Iceland’s mild climate, many rivers, wealth of fisheries and agriculture, as well as its obsidian, lignite and sulphur mines ...”

“... both his fiancée and his mother by his aloofness: he browbeats shop assistants by flaunting his service at the Front: his emotional repertoire consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read Rupert Brooke near the graves of a major and a private, and muses thus: ‘I cannot help thinking of the two together and of the greater value ...”

“... of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, the only comic terrorist organisation in the history of the cinema. In fact, I should like to postulate the existence of a secret ...”

“... though, are the sensuous ‘Dream of Zinc Cream’, on body-surfing, and Mr James’s tribute to Robert Hughes’s magnificent The Fatal Shore, the book in which the story of the convicts in Australia, related in many accounts, is finally unforgettably told. This essay is amongst other things a passionate defence of the benefits expatriation has brought to a ...”

“... line. Obviously Fuegi is extremely knowledgeable about Brecht, but all his knowledge is in the service of a rabid hatred. His book is six hundred pages of loathing, indignation, will-to-assassinate. It is difficult to read such a book, even more difficult not to become desensitised while reading it, to go on responding to its venom and absurdity all the ...”

“... Theakston and Geoffrey Fry, in another collaborative survey, bring their expertise on the Civil Service to bear, notably on the way in which Whitehall was ‘de-privileged’ under Thatcher. Keith Middlemas, an authority on the corporate institutions with which the 20th-century state has become imbricated, writes lucidly on the party’s relations with ...”

“... would bear fruit in later years.Ross’s first big break came when he volunteered for army service during World War One. His interest in the European hostilities was strictly professional: as he saw it, war-reporters were the ultimate hobos. But he had also developed an interest in editing. At 18, on the Maryland Appeal, he had briefly been put in ...”

“... even liberal, white males (Jack Kemp). The logic was simple enough. Starting off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would ...”

“... to earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to ...”

“... interest in the hidden dealings of the rich and powerful. Tiny Rowland, Mohammed Al Fayed and Robert Maxwell have all received the treatment and been carefully scrutinised. His account of Maxwell’s affairs delved into the murky depths, but he also kept a wary eye on the dubious ethics of the business world around the man, and produced an interestingly ...”

“... of The Land of Mist itself, which revives our old friends Challenger, Roxton and Malone in the service of a new cause. But another chapter, and another, and another, is also what Conan Doyle spun out for the Strand. Geraldine Cummins, the medium whose copyright dispute Conan Doyle was called in to arbitrate, gave the metaphor a different spin a few years ...”

“... been murdered in the camps found it hard to speak about their loss. In Germany, the 1964 trial of Robert Mulka – former adjutant to Commandant Rudolf Höss – and 21 others for crimes committed at Auschwitz enabled a new generation to confront the past, but in Britain and the United States it was only some years later that it became possible to broach the ...”

“... of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality, but leaves no one better off. Twenty years ago Robert Frank wrote a brilliant book about the quest for status, Choosing the Right Pond, and Offer’s contribution brings Frank’s analysis up to date. We run faster and faster, for longer and longer, just to keep up. And it isn’t only about status. As Fred ...”

“... suppose and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is too deeply entrenched in our ...”

“... South, blacks were denied the basic prerogatives of citizenship, including the franchise and jury service. As the story is customarily told, the victory against Jim Crow began with the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated schools were constitutionally impermissible. The grassroots movement for civil ...”