“... successors, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf in the south to the Balkans in the north and reached the gates of Vienna in 1683. Then came the long ebb, as the Turks retreated from Europe and others competed to replace them. One power in particular had grown rapidly in importance. The small medieval principality of Muscovy had expanded ...”

“... he stayed until 1931, when he was made bishop of Cashel and Waterford. The MacNeices’ relocation north had not been through choice: Louis’s grandfather had run a mission school on Omey Island off Connemara, but in 1879 sectarian pressures forced him out. In 1913 his mother, after a hysterectomy necessitated by a uterine tumour, was admitted to a Dublin ...”

“... inherited a South Carolina slave plantation, bought his slaves’ freedom and then sent them all north to safety. The lousy businessman was a high-minded visionary. Tappan’s two great principles – abolition and sound business – clashed but, in the pages of his ledger, only creditworthiness counted and Brisbane went down as good for nothing. Misleading ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... to live.Itook​ one of Transport for Greater Manchester’s custard-coloured trams to Bury, north of the city. Bury and the centre of Manchester are about as far apart as the edge and centre of London, but Greater Manchester’s population is less than a third of the capital’s, 2.8 million against 8.9 million. Between the Manchester conurbation and ...”

“... bitterly about Britain’s ‘dishonoured public life’; perhaps the idea of a clean slate in the North might have appealed to him. More recently, he was aware that Scotland had changed and matured in new ways. But, to be honest, it’s more likely that he stayed in tune with Norman MacCaig’s famous tease:My only countryis six feet highand whether I love it ...”

“... It has at times been rendered almost powerless by the actions of distant states, such as North Vietnam, Iran and Israel (and may well now be adversely affected by events in certain of the smaller Latin American states). Naturally this gloomy account can be contested. Every President since Truman can be presented in a more favourable light, and it can ...”

“... the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. ‘The Circus’, it’s worth recalling, is what John Le Carré called his fictional spy headquarters.And then​ there was Peter Sichel, a German Jew from a family who had lost their wine business to the Nazis. He had escaped to Bordeaux and, after France fell, to the US via Spain. Aged nineteen, he enlisted ...”

“... received psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital in 1980. Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, left the briefing and branded him a ‘psychopath’ – a slur it has been hard for Father Aristide to get over. It would be convenient for the traditional Haitian elites and their allies abroad if Aristide, who has been forced to preside over ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and disloyalty ...”

“... Mbembe was told that he’d been accused of antisemitism. The festival is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which – like most German states – has in recent years cancelled funding for organisations and individuals with ties to the pro-Palestinian BDS movement. Mbembe’s case made headlines. Even some of the more conservative German papers ...”

“... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... last years. The best-known part of Kelley’s story concerns his long partnership with the magus John Dee. It begins with his arrival at Dr Dee’s house, in the Thameside village of Mortlake, near London, in early March 1582. Dee, then in his mid-fifties, was the Queen’s chief consultant on all matters occult. He was renowned as a ...”

“... immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on ...”