“... clashing title turns out to be part of the point. The novel is set in a small French town in the north, towards Belgium; the time must be the late 1930s. The original Krull, Cornelius, was German, but has spent four-fifths of his life in France, and became naturalised before the First World War; he still barely speaks French and is losing his German. A ...”

“... or Iggy Pop’s The Idiot? Kraftwerk have a track called ‘Numbers’, but I prefer Soft Cell’s John Rechy-inspired single of the same name, one of the great lost 45s of the 1980s, which involves an entirely other (and far less hygienic) form of accounting. And I haven’t even mentioned that other great pre-techno German dance classic, ‘I Feel Love’ by ...”

“... small townships of the Deep South, as did many of their parents, but from the larger cities of the North, South (and, he might have added, the West, since Southern California, which gave birth to the original Fundamentalist movement, is still host to such key institutions as the Institute of Creation Research). Most American activists, unlike their ...”

“... in and possible debts to black people (not just in his writing: one of his black servants, John Lewes, risked his life to save some members of Twain’s family from certain death – an altruism also exhibited by Jim in Huckleberry Finn). A lot of this material is familiar, as Professor Fishkin most scrupulously acknowledges and details (there are some ...”

“... sensibility: ‘I grew up near and often in the great forests of the New South Wales lower north coast ... my father had been a bullock driver and timber-getter in those forests before he married and started dairy-farming – and yet even I was almost seduced by the myth of the alien bush, as I began learning to write poetry. A received sensibility ...”

“... Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the East was loyal to the Union while the Midwest supported the Confederacy) and the state government works ...”

“... inadequacies of sensibility. A new intellectual civil war seems to have broken out between North and South in the United States – the battle currently in progress, as I write, is the Evolution Trial in Little Rock, Arkansas – and this volume is another skirmish in its own right. Goldman’s is a standard New York metropolitan horror, hideously ...”

“... became all but invisible. Fortunately, in 1962, a new campaign of restoration was undertaken by John Brealey, under the supervision of Anthony Blunt. The results were remarkable. Although the pictures now displayed in the Orangery at Hampton Court are obviously little more than shadows of their former selves, and one could not be restored at all, enough has ...”

“... murder of several members of the South Korean Government in Burma in 1983 is flatly attributed to North Korea, but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this. Of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II Laqueur can only comment that ‘the extent of Bulgarian involvement cannot be proven in a court of ...”

“... both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one wants a bigger canvas? All three of the books discussed here are wonderfully ambitious though very different attempts to get beyond the old imperial history, and to do so with regard to huge territories and in the longue durée. It ...”

“... is doing to the natural world. The statistics support this argument: the global population of North Atlantic right whales, for instance, has dropped from an estimated twenty thousand before industrial-scale hunting in the 19th century to 458 today.It would be hard to fault either the motives or the facts underlying King’s ecological zeal. But it’s ...”

“... and, by implication, to ideas.In Naples, Antonello would have been exposed to other artists from north of the Alps. The angular, almost abstract quality of some of his early works – including the Virgin and Child with a Franciscan Donor, the Virgin Reading (a work not accepted as autograph by all scholars) and the Portrait of a Man, now in Pavia – has ...”

“... goes on to describe a time ‘When Troy towers are a feeble analogy and/ the Harrying of the North a child’s tale, when/fear rules and bombast pretends to be competence./Because of the detestable counsel, directly/because of the merchants’ rule.’ Aware that some readers might have their doubts about such a diagnosis of the causes of the ...”

“... dramatic self-doubt even after winning the Houghton Mifflin poetry award for her first collection, North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to ...”

“... years of travel was lack of access to books, and he might have continued to beat his way across North America but for the accident he had after moving north to Canada in pursuit of Klondike gold, when he fell while attempting to leap onto a train – an episode recounted in winningly laconic fashion: I attempted to ...”