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“... staged re-enactments of beatings that have already taken place, or prophecies of those to come? We will not know more until the court martial runs its course, and we may not know everything even then. The assessment has just begun. Meanwhile in the US the American Civil Liberties Union recently released another report ...”

“... even those on the right, have approached their subject in a different spirit. In 2015 the Bush White House veteran Jonathan Horn published The Man Who Would Not Be Washington, a consideration of Lee’s failure to defend his country in its hour of need. Allen Guelzo’s new study goes further. An unusual figure in the American academy – an eminent ...”

“... through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied ...”

“... caused by the Highland Clearances. Mel Gibson in Braveheart wears a kilt to play William Wallace. George IV squeezed himself into a kilt and pink tights to visit Edinburgh. Livingstone was supposed to get on well with Africans because of his Highland ancestry. It wasn’t until the 1960s that radicals like Tom Nairn and Murray Grigor began to satirise ‘the ...”

“... made an eloquent case for cosmopolitanism as an answer to the provincialism of patriotism. If we regard ourselves as ‘citizens of the world’, we are better able not only to know ourselves but to work out differences with others beyond our national borders and share moral responsibility for the rest of ...”

“... that our future is secure, but a ragged outcast howling in the wilderness who warns us that unless we change our ways, we are unlikely to have any future at all. The wild-eyed idealists are those who expect the future to turn out pretty much like the present; the hard-nosed pragmatists are those who know that it will be ...”

“... for a hit, talking of samsara and Kropotkin – seems a type as exotic as an Elizabethan dandy: We would split an amp of methedrine between us, sliding the needle just under the skin in a procedure known as skinpopping … sometimes it seemed to me that the drugs were almost irrelevant and what mattered was the expeditionary instinct that had Bryn and me ...”

“... A grey dark day and raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is tumultuous, though the torrent has never been as powerful as it was in 1967 when (perhaps melodramatically) I envisaged the lake dam breaking and engulfing the whole village. The lake itself is ...”

“... feature in all these events was that Obama himself seemed far from the scene. He was looking on, we were made to think, with concern and understanding. But in matters like these, one could easily feel that a conspicuous sign of a ‘hands-on’ president was needed. Apparently Obama was startled by the bad rollout of healthcare – shocked and dismayed like ...”

“... was Dorsey, because by then Twitter was all anyone wanted to talk about. In fact one reason we know so much about the trip is that Dorsey and his colleagues spent much of their time tweeting about it, sending news of their journey in electronic haiku to their followers back home. ‘Lots of helicopters,’ Dorsey observed on his Twitter feed: ‘Met the ...”

“... nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich ...”

“... he seemed to belong in American football or body-building. This was no coincidence, because we now know that, like many of the practitioners of those sports, McGwire had achieved his unusual shape by taking steroids. It is not simply hindsight to say that many people suspected as much at the time. It’s just that not many of them cared. At one point ...”

“... anoth er Nigerian, Kole Omotoso – Achebe or Soyinka? – which is bound to remind the read er of George Steiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? After four decades of labour, there are some twenty books, including novels, short stories, children’s fiction, poetry and essays; Achebe has also edited literary journals and anthologies, and still found the time to ...”

“... largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history’; we may compare it with the uprootings of peoples by Assyrian or Mongol conquerors. His book is massively researched, with the fullest use of official papers, but with the greatest weight attached to the convicts’ own testimony, surviving in ...”

“... The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands. The year she took up with a married man was also the year Ruskin’s wife revealed her husband’s impotence during court proceedings. ‘Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it,’ Eliot wrote ironically in Daniel Deronda ...”