“... by scholars whose main source was the Bible. (The evangelical adventurer and self-publicist John MacGregor found this a problem on a canoe trip down the Jordan in 1868.) Aspirant surveyors quickly discovered that they needed the co-operation of local tribal leaders, some of whom collaborated in the hope that it would encourage a British force to invade ...”

“... role.’ Turning the page, readers discovered mat Monday’s Radio 1 schedule included ‘John Peel ... live in Manchester with Number One Cup in session and poetry from sex-bard Simon Armitage’. Armitage’s ability to play goalkeeper in both divisions, to two-time Radio 1 and Radio 3, to learn not only from Heaney but from Peel (about whom he has ...”

“... after which a framing story loops back towards the book’s first sentence. Along with the Being John Malkovich effect that Hemon gets by surrounding Pronek with other versions of himself, all this just about dovetails with his thematic concerns. A sense of ‘stale disreality’ with regard to personal identity afflicts all his displaced characters sooner ...”

“... genial voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). The narrator’s name is Silver, as in Long John. She lives with her mother in Salts, in the far north-west of Scotland near Cape Wrath: ‘cliff-perched, wind-cleft’, a ‘Fossil Town’, ‘salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too’. When her mother ...”

“... direct visitors to the site of Rip Van Winkle’s cottage, and recently there was a move to rename North Tarrytown ‘Sleepy Hollow’ – an idea that seemed authentic to everyone except the people who lived there. In the same myth-making spirit, Maxwell Anderson’s play places a chorus of ghosts on High Tor. His ancient Indian (the last of his ...”

“... a Land Rover driven by a Chechen. Dressed in a vintage Puma tracksuit he resembles ‘the infamous North Korean playboy Kim Jong Il’; swaddled in a Hyatt Hotel robe he feels ‘like the Reichstag must have felt when it was being draped by Christo’. Squalid, horrifying and attractive, Misha is meant to embody the excesses and contradictions of our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror ...”

“... 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 ...”