“... ethnic conflict. American reviewers have been unable to resist comparing Shteyngart’s book with John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces, though the two novels share very little beyond an omnivorous, obese hero who falls for a girl from the Bronx. Temperamentally, Misha Vainberg is Ignatius Reilly’s opposite. Reilly railed against the lack of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... call from a former student of mine. He wants to go to Lebanon. He reported from Sarajevo for the Christian Science Monitor but then thought better of all that, found a piece of land and a wife in Helena, Montana, sells hot dogs out of one of those corrugated steam wagons during the warm months, and writes during the winter. He’s half Lebanese and speaks ...”

“... for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. They dreamed of creating new Black Christian subjects who would accept their guidance and eventually become ‘like them’. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this ...”

“... John Reed,​ witness to the October Revolution and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, seems to have turned against the Bolshevik leaders just before he died in Moscow in 1920. His apostasy was not publicly known, however, and a decade later the American Communist Party, eager to exploit his fame, encouraged the formation of John Reed Clubs in New York and other cities ‘to bring closer all creative workers ...”

“... the giant vigilante organisation which centres on Pietersburg. Founded by a black businessman, John Magolego, Mapogo now has 35,000 paid up members, 10,000 of them white – it’s a booming business. It moves into an area, rounds up criminal suspects, beats the hell out of them, drags them behind vans on rocky roads or dangles them over crocodile-infested ...”

“... has to be presented, and indeed published in Latin. In an attempt to keep the tradition alive, John Paul II encouraged communities to put forward candidates for sanctification. The 482 new saints announced during his long pontificate amounted to almost a quarter of all those canonised in the previous five hundred years. At present some three thousand cases ...”

“... the Queen’s Gallery. Nasir-al-Din Haider had got clearance from the resident in Lucknow, Colonel John Low, and from the governor-general in Calcutta, Lord William Bentinck, to dispatch the offerings: two elephants, two superb horses with jewelled harnesses, sundry necklaces, bracelets and Indian manuscripts galore, together with a bedstead studded with ...”

“... state in waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... unit, set square to the prevailing on-shore winds. The occupier, New York-born to a childhood in John Cheever commuting country, now reinvented as a Vietnam-vintage Irish citizen, removes all the offending oil paintings from the wall: jewelled landscapes in oil; lively, naive renderings of the headland on which the cottages have been built. Expressionist ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”

“... sides. We are going to live in a garret.’) The forthcoming marriage occasioned a long letter to John Hilton, a schoolfriend who offered to intercede between MacNeice and his prospective in-laws, the Beazleys. It comes as a relief and a shock to read it. Here, at last, is the intimate voice: here goes: Apologia pro Vita Mea. Only not even an apologia. (You ...”

“... and nationalism, was ended by the Crimean War, and Russia was further angered by the sight of two Christian powers fighting alongside a Muslim ally. Lingering Russian resentment was one cause of the disruption of international relations and the destabilisation in the Balkans that ultimately led to the Great War. And the participation of the greatest Muslim ...”

“... than Americans think they do and a great deal less than British people think Australians do. In John O’Grady’s poem ‘Integrated Adjective’, an Australian in a bar is overheard saying he’s been ‘Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos’. The poet describes the integration of the group around the use of the inte-bloody-grated ...”