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“... luxury [that] played to every Western European stereotype … about the decadent Orient’, as Richard Miles puts it in his impressive new history of Carthage. Pointing out that Rome’s triumph over Carthage ‘provided an attractive blueprint’ and ‘metaphor’ to justify French domination in North Africa, ...”

“... music videos, an effect enhanced by guest appearances from Phil Collins, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Miles Davis and many others. But the other, complementary theory of the series’ origin names a news story about vice cops using repossessed goods as a glossy cover for their assumed criminal characters. This is why ...”

“... pickets: in one notorious instance, Kent miners were turned back at the Dartford tunnel, 200 miles from their objective. While this case hit the headlines, the everyday use of roadblocks did not; nor did the common practice of stopping coaches of pickets miles from their destination, forcing the occupants to walk. Nor ...”

“... half the length of a freighter Boeing 747’s cargo deck – at an airspeed of around seven miles per hour, in a motorised glider optimistically but, as it turned out, correctly named Flyer. Orville Wright was by no means the first man aloft, but he was the first man actually to fly an aeroplane. As he later put it, in characteristically forensic ...”

“... the summer warning his countrymen of imminent social catastrophe. ‘It is my firm belief,’ Richard Cobden told the House of Commons in July, ‘that within six months we shall have populous districts in the north in a state of social dissolution.’ Privately, he was even less guarded. ‘The manufacturing classes’, he confided to a newspaper ...”

“... for a split at 1815 and an end in the 1880s. So in choosing to conclude his new survey at 1880, Richard Price joins a long tradition of irreverent timekeeping. Except that, according to Price, it is not the 19th century that ends in the 1880s, but the ‘long’ 18th century. In recent years the lifetime of the distinctive political regime and social ...”

“... from their frozen obscurity and brought back to life, once more to browse the Arctic plains? Richard Stone assumes that attempts to revive mammoths are a practical possibility. Frozen mammoth sperm, so the theory goes, may yet be viable. Techniques are already used routinely in fertility treatment that allow defrosted sperm to fertilise living eggs, so ...”

“... another is to export him to England, to a voluble career in television. This is the fate of Miles O’Malley, hero of Terence de Vere White’s Chat Show. Chance brings him into chat-showmanship at the age of 42 – and Miles is indeed a chancer, a shamelessly obsessive promoter of himself, accurately described by one ...”

“... Sea. ‘What passes in those remote depths – what beings live, or can live, twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters – what is the organisation of these animals, we can scarcely conjecture.’ Much the same could be said today, 140 years on from the voyage of the Nautilus, with less than 5 per cent of the world’s 320 million cubic ...”

“... all rather shabby and haphazard. It was not for want of money – Lydia was very well off, though Richard Kahn, a Cambridge economist and Keynes’s literary executor, was tight-fisted with her allowance. The pictures were not well arranged or dusted – when I took one down, the skeleton of a small bird fell out from behind it. ‘They do not belong to ...”

“... forms, does a little of both.At its height, the Chappe telegraph network spread for three thousand miles across France, and into Germany and Northern Italy. As modern Paris changed beyond recognition in the early 19th century, the telegraph cranked enigmatically overhead. It was used primarily for conveying state and military information (and, from 1803, the ...”

“... on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War ...”

“... running. I drove up the beach, waved on by flags, through the dunes, and then, for about eight miles, followed the divisional signs, through liberated villages, past burnt-out vehicles, and the utterly unexpected sight of crosses made of raw wood. Except for a few days as a very small child near Le Touquet, this was my first holiday abroad. At last we ...”

“... version, and is still included in the Ethiopian Bible. For all these reasons it is surprising that Miles Bredin’s The Pale Abyssinian is only the third biography of Bruce to have been published in over two centuries. The first, by the Orientalist Alexander Murray, which is included in the second and third editions of Bruce’s Travels (1805, 1813), is brief ...”

“... 265,000 Italians surrendered and 400,000 fled in confusion, while the pursuing forces advanced 50 miles in just over two days. Most important of all, the October Revolution and the disintegration of the tsarist army took Russia out of the war. This enabled the Germans to redeploy huge numbers of troops – their forces on the Western Front increased from 3.25 ...”