“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... started. In truth our understanding of how bedbugs get about has changed little since 1730, when John Southall published his Treatise of Buggs: By Shipping they were doubtless first brought to England, so are they now daily brought. This to me is apparent, because not one Sea-Port in England is free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known … If ...”

“... edited by Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith. Thanks particularly to the editors’ introduction and John Eddy’s essay on the effect of sunspots, the debate was pushed in a new direction: climate change and its impact on the food supply and demography now became a central theme. The absence of recorded sunspots and the presence of substantial carbon-14 ...”

“... university dropout son, Julian, and his teenage girlfriend, Sasha, passing through on a road trip north, unaware that the house is occupied. ‘He didn’t remember me, and why should he?’ Evie says of Julian. ‘I was a woman outside his range of erotic attentions.’ But then Julian does remember: ‘She was in this cult,’ he explains to Sasha. Evie ...”

“... a new Laure Prouvost show and Charlie Gard and Call Me by Your Name and cab drivers in Rome and John McCain’s part in the GOP vote to roll back Obamacare. And a year later, almost to the day, here is Crudo – born of accident, on holiday, like a dare – and it is already on the Sunday Times bestseller list. ‘Kathy, by which I mean I,’ it ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”