“... observation while vindicating Newton’s theory. All went well until the mid-19th century, when John Couch Adams showed that Laplace’s calculations were incomplete and actually accounted only for about half of the observed effect. The apparent agreement between Halley and Laplace was ruined and nationalistic passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams ...”

“... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...”

“... Coleridge’s​ favourite novelist, John Galt, had a gift for encapsulating disgrace under pressure, and his novels of small-town Scottish life are among the early masterpieces of British political fiction. After a life of robust colonial effort, during which he founded the Canadian city of Guelph, Galt – exhausted and impoverished – came back to Greenock and died there in 1839 ...”

“... insisted that Georgia was changing. Thanks to the reverse migration of Black people from the North, she noted, the Black population was now a third of the electorate; Georgia also had an increasing number of Latino and Asian voters who, along with liberal whites, could form a Democratic majority. In 2018 she came close to winning the gubernatorial ...”

“... the end, however, he decided to build his own palace on a plot of land some twenty blocks further north on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Builders broke ground on the property in 1912, the same year Frick acquired what has become one of the most celebrated works in the collection: Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More. (In due ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... mortality pattern of the period appears to lie within the systems covered by the Princeton North tables. Another problem patch is the 17th-century Interregnum, for replacement of ecclesiastical by secular registration created its own problems of under-recording. Some of the adjustments made are fairly arbitrary: in 17th-century London, plague ...”

“... confronts this prejudice in his new volume. Dividing his poems into those set in exile in the ‘North’ (the United States and Britain) and those of the ‘South’ (the Antilles and Greece), he seems about to offer a conventional contrast between hot and cold. In one of the first poems, we observe him shivering in exile through a Manhattan winter, ‘flu ...”

“... in the Far East? A return to America Firstism, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism along the North African littoral, political revolution in China? Maybe. What does seem clear, however, is that with the old two-bloc balance gone, it will be some time before a new three-bloc balance is achieved. The proximate new rulers of the world are the G7 states, but ...”

“... moral and physical welfare of the tropical traveller. No recent guide has surpassed the excellent John Hatt’s remarks on underwear in The Tropical Traveller (1982). Hatt insists that this ‘must be of pure cotton’ and urges a change of attitude, or perhaps a readjustment, for anyone foolish enough to hit the tropics wearing ‘the “jockey” style of ...”

“... The date was 24 March 1847; the place was the home of a friend on Hill Street in Hannibal, where John Clemens had taken to his bed with a cold that developed into pneumonia. It was in that room, only minutes before his father’s final rattling breaths, that young Sam for the first time watched one member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put ...”

“... it bursts on the scene already mature. The sort of joint-stock venture capitalism that swept over north-western Europe in the 17th century lacked the refinements of a 21st-century public limited company. But its cast of characters, and the manic-depressive psychology of speculative investment, were there from the first day. We know that cast all too well. It ...”

“... the normalisation of relations with China. Two decades earlier, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had refused to shake Zhou Enlai’s hand: Kissinger not only did so but hailed him and Mao as great statesmen. Rather than claiming the right to project American power into the Communist world in the name of freedom, Kissinger promised to ...”

“... racist. Consciously or not, it also imitates far funnier and more successful examples, such as John Barth’s ‘Petition’ from Lost in the Funhouse, addressed to the King of Siam. The novel is not, contrary to confused assertions in the Indian press, another attempt at a form of Indian magical realism in the wake of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. No ...”

“... group had spent a couple of days in the Iraq Museum and then split into two units, one going north to Nineveh, Nimrud, Assur and Hatra, the other south to Babylon, Kish, Nippur, Uruk, Ur, Lagash. The Unesco team, however, was allowed only a limited stay in the country, was not permitted to go outside Baghdad, and its members had to live in tents in the ...”