“... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...”

“... tone pretty well with his remark that ‘the Jewish Marienbad has gone downhill since the British King Edward died.’ But Mr Soroker’s social standing is toppled by an epistle in the most ceremonious and denunciatory Hebrew from the formidably orthodox Itche-Meyers, accusing him of paying Falstaffian attentions to both their wives: their letter (here ...”

“... and they are moved by human motives. It is not merely that their morals are mortal – that the King of the Gods is more renowned for the ingenuity of his philandering than for the wisdom and justice of his rule. Olympus is also a theatre of the trivial and the frivolous, of tiffs and squabbles, and of buffoonery: limping Hephaestus is a figure of fun ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... river, like memory, full of people, places, ideas, things, all with an ambiguous reality status. King Kole, the Aboriginal cricketer, standing at the rail of the Paramatta, watching a pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew he had arrived at the Land of Death. Gravesend did for Pocahontas, the Indian princess, too: she died there, on her way ...”

“... are Biblical or mythical, Gawain describes its hero – a knight at the legendary court of King Arthur – on a journey to fulfil a promise made to a mysterious green-skinned knight. He travels past Anglesey, through North Wales and into the Wirral and then penetrates ‘countrayez straunge’ (countries strange). On a map, if you draw a circle around ...”

“... the 1970 ‘School Kids Issue’ of Oz. The classic defence tactic was used of having counsel – John Mortimer QC – representing two of the editors and arguing issues of law, while the other, Richard Neville, represented himself and said things that lawyers were not permitted to say (though Mortimer was at his fluent best when not talking about the ...”

“... however, he was painting. His first inspiration came, apparently, through exposure to the works of John Constable in 1839; within a few years he was painting the small studies of everyday urban sites that include some of his best known work but which began to emerge from his studio only around the turn of the century, just before his death in 1905. Rear ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... the rooftops of Sauchiehall Street might be Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, as drawn by Jessie M. King. For there is another character evident, one which so many of the visitors come to see: the sensuous, decorative excitement of the Art Nouveau. It is there in the treatment of the metalwork, in the tapering timber columns of the central first floor ...”

“... the lights finally asked her to leave. A letter in the New York Times on 23 December, from a Mr John E. Colbert in Chicago, defended the White House’s recent compromises: President Obama is a realist who gets things done: he makes his case, counts votes, makes his best deal and the country moves forward. That’s progress. He doesn’t gloat or count ...”

“... Walsingham gave to Sidney and Languet and other terror-stricken Protestants in Paris. Perhaps, as John Cooper conjectured in his 2011 Life of Walsingham, such scenes were literally indescribable in diplomatic correspondence, their details committed instead for maximum security to the memory of couriers who conveyed the news to London. While the events of St ...”

“... themselves on the British imagination. One of these was the massacre at Kanpur, where the Maratha king Nana Sahib turned against a corps of about a thousand Europeans, laying siege to their cramped entrenchments. After a punishing fortnight under fire, and some 250 deaths, the British surrendered with a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. But as they pushed ...”

“... about whether he’d have to walk backwards down the steps after receiving his prize from the King of Sweden (about which he was seriously nervous); he traded bonhomous badinage with girlfriends from the distant past; he cheerfully sent the photographs and supplied the autographs; he commended the amateur physicists for their bold ...”