“... prerogatives; the bargaining with the parliament of 1523; the administrative initiatives in the North and Wales. In all these instances Gwyn may be right. Yet when politicians repeat the policies of their predecessors they do so in altered circumstances and under fresh pressures. To be convinced by Gwyn’s account of the cardinal’s aims we would need a ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of ...”

“... projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss Peary’s base at Ellesmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead. Reading this passage in the spirit of Bernard Carlson’s ...”

“... course of the Nile in the south from what he takes to be its presumptive mirror image in the north, the Danube. Catherine Darbo-Peschanski attributes this view of physis (nature) to Herodotus’ belief in a general and overarching divine pattern ruled by dikê (justice), covering all aspects of culture from geography to the animal world, including human ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... London dispatched no less a figure than the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Harding. Within a month of his arrival in 1955, he told the cabinet with brutal candour that if self-determination was ruled out, ‘a regime of military government must be established and the country run indefinitely as a police state.’ He was as good as ...”

“... 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 ...”