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“... the beginning: it follows the family through two centuries, and from England to the Caribbean and North America and back again. As he approaches his subject’s birth this method presents Roe with a difficulty which remains throughout the book: the dense intertwining of private and public themes. Isaac Hunt, Leigh’s father, found himself in Philadelphia in ...”

“... metaphor, deployed as the Volunteer is leaving the ‘broad brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive effects work in both directions). Also ...”

“... to speak directly of the times we live in. ‘The Watering Place’ after Peter Paul Rubens by John Browne (1770) There is, however, nothing irrelevant about the new show at the Royal Academy, featuring Gainsborough, Constable and Turner; not because of anything it has to say about ‘the making of landscape’, but because it is so evidently a show for ...”

“... Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J.S. Mill in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell ...”

“... than twenty years elapsed between the discovery of extensive stone artefacts in the Nile Valley, north of Aswan, and the appearance in print of the definitive publication on yet another fragment of human prehistory. The story of the discoveries deriving from the Palaeolithic to Neolithic periods is one of infinite pains taken by unusually patient men and ...”

“... Nixon had flirted with using nuclear weapons in conversations with Henry Kissinger during the North Vietnamese offensive of spring 1972. When Kissinger told him it ‘would just be too much’, Nixon was outraged: ‘I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.’ Kissinger soon learned to think big. At the Paris peace talks in December, he ...”

“... the US. A new spirit of patriotism was stirring as Japan continued its creeping aggression in the north. Army recruits were given lectures on ‘The Coming Sino-Japanese War’ and ‘How to Make Sacrifices’. Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Children at a school in Jiangsu who were too poor to buy their textbooks complained that they would have to ...”

“... because Iran would retaliate. The next logical step for Iran would be to follow the example set by North Korea three years ago: withdraw from the NPT and expel the IAEA inspectors. That would lead to a more dangerous situation, as it would then be difficult to constrain Iran without military action. The Europeans’ view is that it is better to keep Iran ...”

“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few ...”

“... Coast, the family Hillman Minx would head not towards a nearby Channel port but westwards, or north-westwards, or just plain north. In perverse flight from the sunlit sandy beaches of Bournemouth – which attracted mere holidaymakers, the kind who were starting to take package trips to Benidorm instead – we, like the ...”

“... buildings are gone and so are the laughing children and the shoppers. This is the beginning of the North Peckham Estate. From its foothills of modern maisonettes and bungalows, the estate rises to a series of peaks in the centre consisting of 1960s concrete blocks five storeys high. On my way to Peckham, I’d gone past an estate near Elephant and Castle. I ...”

“... much more than the boundaries of good taste, it would be difficult to tell from The Farthest North of Humanness. The philistine reaction to flagellation and sexual experiment was exactly what Grainger wanted, of course, and the reponse to this monster volume of letters, assisted by some unintentionally comic editing, is likely to be one that would have ...”

“... achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is ...”

“... unaided by experiment or instruments, could arrive at exact knowledge. Some two centuries later, John Herschel, in his textbook, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), warned the novice that the human sense apparatus was too crude and subjective an instrument to discover anything of scientific moment. The senses, he argued, must be ...”

“... household instead of a croft wife, perching on a clerk’s stool rather than fishing the North Sea. Better, says the schoolmaster, that his pupils should stick to those homely activities sanctioned by the pastoral poets of antique times; his audience hasn’t the least idea what he is on about. ‘Please, sir, you’ve broke your glasses!’ says one ...”