“... Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards the edge of the Downtown cluster of corporate towers, and makes a subversive play on them by actually being two towers, only ten feet apart. Their surface is refinedly ...”

“... motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the Border. When the votes were counted, the unionist parties picked up over two-thirds of the seats in the new Parliament. Despite the undoubted drift away from Britishness over the past decade or so, the SNP took a slightly lower share of the ...”

“... Penny, or perhaps for the faded librarian Ianthe Broome. The parish of St Basil, on the fringe of North Kensington in NW London, may not be classic Austen country, but the principal characters, all off-spring of deceased Anglican clergymen, might be the equivalents of Jane herself. Like any Austen novel, An Unsuitable Attachment makes a cluster of courtships ...”

“... in South American politics – apart perhaps from worrying about the imperious interventions of North Americans, so eager to counter the threat of Communism in their hemisphere. Huneeus stimulated an interest in such matters which persisted in Gould until the Chilean’s premature death in the Eighties. Gould then travelled to Chile, hoping to discover what ...”

“... by the 19th century, when the French imaginaire was dominated by a Near East which included North Africa, and when the term croisade had long been at home in the French language (the English and German equivalents did not appear until the 18th century), the French saw the crusades as historically theirs, and French scholars dominated the ...”

“... Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno. Menno Simons was a Dutch heretic, the spiritual leader of a North European Anabaptist faction that emerged from the Münsterite rebellion of the 1530s. Although less insurrectionist than its antecedents, Reformation Mennonism was a sternly dissentient creed, loathed by Protestant power-brokers, but its puritan radicalism ...”

“... own national assemblies. In Southern Europe, these are generally much lower than those of the North, because it’s assumed that deputies will maximise the perks of office. The notion that expenses should be validated by receipts would greatly increase the load on the generally less efficient bureaucracies of the South. The pragmatic solution therefore is ...”

“... as well surrender hope right away. I was still an art critic in those days, and I would drive from north-east of Los Angeles, where I was supposed to settle into my new suburban existence, over to the downtown museums, look at some art, and drive back. But when I got home I would find that the hours I’d spent negotiating freeway merge lanes and entrances and ...”

“... a woman, a Japanese American, a WASP officer and a grunt. I’ll add Bao Ninh, who enlisted in the North Vietnamese army at 17. He remembers that the strongest reason for killing American soldiers was to eat: ‘A GI carried enough food for a picnic.’ Bao Ninh is quiet, sardonic – a dandy almost – and a good novelist (The Sorrows of War). He seems ...”

“... devised an ‘electronic fence’, made up of thousands of sensors dropped across the jungles of North Vietnam. These were designed to detect enemy troop movements by such tell-tale signs as the smell of urine or ground vibrations from the movement of trucks and tanks. But the North Vietnamese soon devised effective ...”

“... south through the Brenner Pass, the Allies hoped in vain that he would halt at a defensive line north of Rome, knowing that they lacked the strength to meet massed Wehrmacht ranks head on.As Allied troops learned to fight within their means, the rains set in, churning up the strade bianche, and the advance slowed. Men of the British 8th Army, used to racing ...”

“... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...”

“... allowing a glimpse of Venice across the lagoon, then retreats into the campagna. As we headed north, the hills bulked larger and darker. We got off the train at Conegliano, just north of Treviso, where we caught a bus to Tezze di Piave. I picked some straggly poppies at the roadside. Tezze is a small town, much prized ...”

“... father was a printer’s overseer for a Nonconformist weekly on Fleet Street, from a line of North Wales plasterers and stonemasons. His mother’s family were pure Rotherhithe: boatbuilders and shipwrights, her father a mast-and-block maker competent ‘in all that belongs to a ship’s carpentry’. Starting out as a teacher and governess, Alice Jones ...”

“... time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on ...”