“... a seemingly impossible 60-day voyage, sailing a six-log raft fifteen hundred miles from their north-eastern village to Rio to dramatise their demand for social reform. Thus, Welles managed to lose the sympathy of the Brazilian regime as well as the support of his studio, RKO, which underwent its own palace coup and, in the summer of 1943, pulled the plug ...”

“... has dug up letters describing wanted felons and outlaws circulated by towns in Switzerland and north-west Germany from the late 14th century, and registers of pilgrims who deposited valuables at Italian hospitals. In some instances, the name alone was thought sufficient, despite the variation in spelling so common at the time. Often height and appearance ...”

“... West, rather as paper-making spread from Asia through the Arab world from the eighth century, to North Africa and eventually to Spain. Gutenberg doesn’t seem to have travelled much, however, and even if a Korean text printed in movable type appeared in Mainz, White is probably right to doubt that Gutenberg could have guessed the method behind it. But even ...”

“... come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other. Understandably so, since defining this entity in its own terms ...”

“... study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that December, articulates the last-great-cause attitude better than anyone: ‘Never again will men of every creed and tongue go to war with the ...”

“... of the final word.Cusk has said that once ‘you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous’. An art closer to statement, or built on testimony, might be said to look pain in the face without distraction and obfuscation. But an aesthetic like Barker’s, which is invested in the ...”

“... way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem into unlikely and unsettling places, and was already at odds ...”

“... furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which they fought their wars to sustain. As late as 1940, they sent their expeditionary force to North Africa and Italy, locating themselves not in the Pacific but in the chain of oceans which linked them with Britain; this link has gone, probably for ever, with the British decision for Europe, and they find themselves appended to that Pacific which has an ...”