“... 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 ...”

“... and his supporters have a strong case. Soviet expansion is not confined to the Baltic and the North Sea: rather it is likely to pose an increasing threat outside the Nato area. But, given Britain’s economic plight and the additional burden of defending the Falklands for an indefinite period, it is hard to see how Mr Speed’s requirements for a ...”

“... and to prevent the establishment of a preponderance of hostile forces on the opposite side of the North Sea and the Channel or across the Irish Sea. Elizabethan England and Spain had come into conflict because that balance of power – with its attendant threat to the safety of the seas and to England herself – had tilted in Spain’s favour. Throughout the ...”

“... effect won the war to liberate Zimbabwe, but its capital’s street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between Samora Machel and Mugabe. Since those two famous explorers never came anywhere near ...”

“... by the return of hostages, the US and allies’ refraining from joint military exercises, and the North Korean destruction of test facilities. The process has only just begun, but the foreign policy establishment, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Fareed Zakaria, have struck an odd posture by declaring peaceful relations with ...”

“... the indigenes in comfort’. The British bombed revolutionaries in Egypt and Pathans on India’s North-West Frontier in 1915. After the First World War, the future of the British Air Force was guaranteed by Mohammed Abdille Hassan, the troublesome ‘mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... TV. With all its virtues of sympathy and sensibility, this biography is much too long. A suburban North London childhood (Scott was born in 1920), a mother with a devouring emotional passion for the second son she regarded as a prodigy almost from birth, unremarkable schooldays, equally unremarkable experiments in homosexuality, bad youthful poems, accounts ...”

“... vote was quickly extended to the majority of British men, and he started his political life as North-East organiser and agitator for the Social Democratic Federation. It was cruel work, and he found the narrow, sectarian approach of the SDF unconvincing and unattractive. Before long he was on his way south to take part in the event which shaped the rest of ...”

“... inexhaustible. He makes careful and instructive discriminations on the place of Hebrew as a north-west semitic language in the ancient Near East; on the specialised and archaic language of Biblical poetry, the stylised language of Biblical narrative, and the inferred vernacular of the Biblical period; on the watershed changes from Biblical to rabbinic ...”

“... is healthier than in most mainland cities of its size. Belfast will never be the Athens of the north, but compared to Dublin, which is looking more like its Naples all the time, it seems trim and buoyant, with an almost manic optimism in the air, the irrational euphoria of the survivor. If our towns, like the French, adopted the custom of listing their ...”