“... 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 ...”

“... in Morocco – timed to coincide with military uprisings across Spain – but was now stuck in North Africa and unable to get his army across to the mainland. Would Hitler provide transport planes, they asked, along with rifles and anti-aircraft guns? After criticising Franco for his funding problem (‘That’s no way to start a war!’), the Nazi leader ...”

“... Sulzberger, he was sent to report from India (whose independence struggle did not galvanise him), North Africa, England and Germany. In 1950, Matthews returned to New York and joined the paper’s editorial board. For the next 17 years, he wrote nearly every one of the editorials on Central and South America. He made regular visits to the region, and boasted ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... to return to rural Georgia after around five years spent pursuing a career as a writer in the North. The parallel is one of the many in-jokes in O’Connor’s fiction. Like Asbury, O’Connor found herself desperately ill on a train journey south. Initially it was thought she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, but tests in February 1951 revealed ...”