“... narrative, and something to the dynamics of contemporary bookselling and the vogue of the Pacific North-West. The book got off to a respectable start in hardcover – it was a good ‘Christmas book’ because of its title and woodsy cover art, the author told Publisher’s Weekly – but it was not until it began to win prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner and ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... The history of England,’ Sir John Seeley declared in The Expansion of England (1883), ‘is not in England but in America and Asia.’ Like many aphorisms, this was at once consciously perverse and entirely apt. Seeley wrote as a fervid supporter of imperial federation, ‘Greater Britain’, but he was also taking issue, as in a preceding series of lectures delivered at Cambridge, with the introspection that characterised so much contemporary English historical writing ...”

“... were attempting to sweep away a highly complex socio-political regime that had no real analogue in North America. And virtually every American patriot leader understood the principle of ‘liberty’ to be compatible with the institution of slavery. The agronomist Arthur Young, a sympathetic observer of both revolutions, wrote in 1796 that they had ‘scarcely ...”

“... always remember where facts ended and conjecture began – the commercial life of ancient North Africa. This manic thoroughness was no penance but a comfort, because long immersion in such alien matter was what Flaubert needed if he wasn’t to succumb to his indignation at the world around him: ‘If I go so slowly, it is because a book for me is a ...”

“... the Airbus 380, which is made in Wales. (They’re so big that they travel from the Dee estuary in North Wales to Pauillac on the Gironde estuary on a specially built roll-on roll-off ship.) This industrial work is high-skill, high-value, and doesn’t provide mass employment; it’s a lot like the kind of service work which thrives in London and the ...”

“... Scotland. Shipyards, quays and graving docks squeezed together along the flat coastal strip to the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday ...”

“... was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of England and among soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war. Everything that he wrote has the feel of direct experience, as though the books composed one long autobiography: yet everything is ...”

“... to keep himself out of prison. An unlikely alliance brought Berlusconi to power in 1994. In the north he partnered with the secessionist Lega Nord, whose founder, Umberto Bossi, said that it was ‘the party of those seeking to continue the partisans’ struggle of liberation against the partitocracy. Never with the fascists!’ In the south he partnered ...”

“... effective, it’s true, but not particularly clandestine either (the journalist and historian John Prebble’s experience was identical); and by June 1944 large parts of the Army had developed from an anti-Fascism more consciously deliberated than ever Churchill’s was, through a famous browned-offness, to something like specifically socialist war ...”

“... a long-standing engagement. The combination of media attention on that day and bad weather in the North makes him want to get out of it. What does he do? He tells his secretary to ring up the Chairman and make the excuse that his wife is unwell. He sees nothing derogatory in this, even recounting it with some relish on an early page. He is an honest man, and ...”

“... most audacious of creative heists, designed the Pompidou Centre. The proposed new town of Hook in north Hampshire was never built, yet John Gold’s book about its planning became an advertisement for British urbanism: the cannily gauged illustrations persuasively suggest a place both modern and homely. The more or less ...”

“... décor. Flandrin’s ‘Entry into Jerusalem’ Flandrin’s Entry into Jerusalem on the north wall of the tribune is in ominous slow motion: Christ in silent profile, the crowd frozen in jubilation behind him, and behind them the implacable geometry of the white city walls. In Christ Carrying the Cross opposite, the drama runs counter to the slow ...”

“... that weakened the polar vortex, the girdle of winds that keeps frigid air corralled at the North Pole’. And the cause of that, in turn, is the vast quantity of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that human activity continues to eructate into the atmosphere, despite our knowing, for decades, about the malign ...”

“... atrocity to atrocity, in one of their series of imaginary conversations, the Noctes Ambrosianae. John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) appears to have been responsible for the horribly inflammatory discussion of the subject there, and to have scripted the contributions assigned to the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. One ...”