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“... as in the case of George IV and his giraffe, which was captured as a calf in Sudan and sent north to Khartoum trussed up on the back of a camel. From there she was sent by boat to Cairo, on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The king had her fed on a supposedly nourishing diet of milk, ordered a warm ...”

“... there, it won’t be the first planet to have been discovered in this way. In 1846, Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier predicted the existence of another planet in the solar system based on perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. He said how big it would appear to be, and which part of the sky it was likely to be found in. But his colleagues at the Paris ...”

“... of the Holy Grail. This was the ultimate relic: the chalice of the Last Supper, later used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood flowing from Christ’s wounds. It features in a long series of romances. In the French Quest of the Holy Grail, written in the early 13th century, Perceval’s sister sheds her virginal blood to heal a leprous lady, thus ...”

“... be traced back to Hindi and Urdu discredited speculation about the Gypsies’ mythical origins in North Africa. In 1782, the philologist Johann Rüdiger published ‘On the Language and Origin of the Gypsies from India’, which argued that Roma should be given the same rights as other European peoples. Rüdiger and other philologists also contrasted the ...”

“... of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it one of the world’s largest 50 private corporations). The young Moon seems to have been an ordinary enough peasant child until, at ...”

“... in the case of spirits), had such a profoundly destructive effect upon the indigenous cultures of North America in the span of a few decades? This is a well-known example. I mention it here because it allows me to introduce an extraordinary page taken from the report that the French Jesuit Paul de Brebeuf sent in 1636 to the provincial priest of the Company ...”

“... expansion into the Crimea and most of present-day Ukraine had been paralleled, further north, by the partition of Poland after a series of agreements between Russia, Austria and Prussia. These agreements were possible, in large part, because of the disruption of European diplomacy caused by bitter Anglo-French discord. During the Crimean War, there ...”

“... in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in Hartford, Connecticut; never travelled outside North America; the usual run of prizes towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and ...”

“... of mutual co-operation’ in response to the virus hasn’t been much in evidence. North sneers at South; South fumes about being caricatured and neglected by North. Glancing through yet another report on EU infighting – ‘the former Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem appearing to suggest that his ...”

“... The sky over North Carolina was showing red the night Sam and Terry decided to leave for the South. The red clouds travelled to Smithfield from the western hills, the high Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Great Smokies. Sam Parham is 27 years old and weighs 260 pounds. For an hour or so, right into the dark, he pulled on the starting string of an electric generator he’d borrowed from his father, until the top of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat ...”

“... parts of the book concern her fights with various unworthy opponents. At the 1981 Cancún North-South Summit she was infuriated by Third World demands that the IMF and World Bank be placed under the control of the UN – where they would have a majority. ‘In the end,’ she writes, she ‘put the point more bluntly: I said that there was no way in ...”

“... time with in Europe. The manuscript of the novel, completed while McKay was living in poverty in North Africa, was abandoned after several publishers turned it down: editors were uncomfortable with McKay’s casual treatment of queer characters and feared that it would not ‘be accepted by the American reading public’.W.E.B. Du Bois said he felt unclean ...”

“... prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iraq or Iran, as Truman threatened to use them against North Korea, would Blair have followed Attlee’s example and flown to Washington to stop him – and would the president have listened, as he did in 1950? This is not a general history of the early Cold War, but rather a study of how the policymaking elites of ...”

“... representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with astonishing frequency at ...”

“... would face when they followed their elders into France’s mines, working the coalfields of the north-east. In the 1960s, the Black South African photographer Ernest Cole (b. 1940) recorded a medical examination of adult males in the gold mines on the Witwatersrand. In Cole’s picture a dozen naked men stand with their faces to the wall, arms ...”