“... political history. The 19th century saw fistfights in Congress and riots at election time in major American cities. Until well into the 20th century, Southern blacks who wanted to exercise the right to vote faced violent retribution from the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. Where does all this originate? In American Revolutions, Alan Taylor offers a ...”

“... the presidency.Inevitably, American history in the second half of the 18th century has become a major theatre in the culture wars, and not only for the right. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, which attempts to update and defamiliarise the founders for a multicultural, multiracial America, derived from Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander ...”

“... political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half ...”

“... with his harsh and jagged short story ‘El Pozo’ (‘The Pit’), 1939; and when he did get a major literary prize, the Cervantes, it was in 1978, late enough for the legend of neglect to be maintained. We get a recent picture of Onetti in Ramon Chao’s book (Onetti, 1990), although not an entirely reliable one perhaps. Partly because he behaves a little ...”

“... Conrad (1960), in which the biographer, having related at length the circumstances in which each major work was written, proceeds to provide a literary-critical essay on it – is generally agreed to be a bastard form, a matter of two quite different books finding themselves within the same pair of covers. Why this must be so is fairly easily seen. For one ...”

“... the next decades, Geertz did the remarkable fieldwork in Java and Bali which produced the five major books on which his long-term reputation rests: The Religion of Java (1960), Pedlars and Princes (1963), Agricultural Involution (1963), The Social History of an Indonesian Town (1965), and Negara (1980). This profusion led to a meteoric academic ascent to a ...”

“... much where we are now. In the early Eighties I used to give talks to the middle managers of a major oil company about the changing international environment. It was my custom to flash up on the projector a map of Orwell’s world in 1984, with the globe divided into the great blocs of Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia. While there was, I said, little Sign of ...”

“... a quieter, more discriminating classical figure, Clio, the Muse of History. In the world of those major goddesses it is ‘As though no one dies in particular/And gossip were never true’. Clio by contrast isMuse of Time, but for whose merciful silenceOnly the first step would count and thatWould always be murder.She is to ‘forgive our noises/And teach us ...”

“... policing make the continent attractive to groups like al-Qaida, and the Pentagon has two major anti-terrorist operations in sub-Saharan Africa: a base in the tiny Red Sea state of Djibouti (sandwiched between Somalia and Eritrea) monitors the movements of suspected terrorists and the Pan Sahel Initiative is intended to hunt down jihadists in the ...”

“... most of them would have served in the Church of England with reasonable good grace. This was a major reformulation of national life, ensuring that thereafter the Established Church was never so overwhelmingly hegemonic in England as were Scandinavian Lutheranism or Mediterranean Catholicism in their respective spheres. English and Welsh Protestantism ...”

“... governments and failed to take up important subjects when it ought to have done. There is one major exception to this generalisation. We know many details about the business of ‘extraordinary rendition’ thanks to the work of journalists writing for mainstream media. One of these is Stephen Grey, a regular contributor to the New York Times, the ...”

“... is in dissent, the senior justice in the majority does the assigning. The current chief justice is John Roberts, who was nominated in 2005 by George W. Bush. Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia ...”

“... lives: the slave-owners received cash or cheques. The struggles of enslaved people, including the major rebellion of 1831 which finally convinced the British Parliament that chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius had to end, resulted in semi-freedom. The system of ‘apprenticeship’, which bound freed men and women to work for ...”

“... prime minister, Fernando Tambroni. The postwar anti-fascist consensus seemed to hold across the major political divides, but the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s led to the collapse of what is now called the First Republic. The only parties left untainted were those that had been excluded from government: the MSI and the successors to the ...”

“... much in its precise destination as in the vistas opened out along the route. Unquestionably, the major contribution to our understanding is to be found in Wind’s essay on the heroic portrait. The substance of this lies in its anatomy of 18th-century portraiture under various heads: portraits of children, of young girls, of men of learning, of military and ...”