According to the menu at Le Cagnard, a restaurant tucked in a 13th-century building along the town's former ramparts, "from the castle's high walls, the lordship used to control the enemy's approach".
Its mini-biographies provide the author with enough thread to weave the larger story of the American left in the twentieth century, from the Daily Worker to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, from the House Un-American ActoviThes Committee to "The Fire Next Time," from Partisan Review to Ramparts, from Vietnam to 9/11.
A coral reef still defends Malindi's ramparts from those who travel by yacht; the reconstructed Vasco da Gama pillar is a chess piece on the water commemorating the deal struck in 1498 with the Portuguese to protect Malindi from Mombasan raiders down the shore.
It was rock with the local legends, the Radiators, at Tipitina's in the gritty warehouse and wharf district; blues with Yvonne Williams and the Juke Joint Players at the Lounge Lizards on Decatur; funk with Funk'n Horns at Donna's Bar and Grill on North Rampart across from Louis Armstrong Park.
One infamous Ramparts cover from 1969 depicted a 6-year-old boy holding a Vietcong flag.
The dark-red brick ramparts, reconstructed from the medieval walls discovered under the debris of war, surround the Old City, bathed in a glow of antique claret.
FROM the ramparts of Bandra fort, built by the Portuguese and now haunted by bashful couples, you can admire Mumbai's new "sealink", a suspension bridge linking the city's suburbs with its downtown neighbourhoods, almost 3 miles (4.7 kilometres) away.
Officers from Rampart have been accused of framing witnesses, working with drug dealers, beating suspects and even murder.
The troops usually required three to four hours to dig a ditch around the periphery, erect a rampart or palisade from timbers carried by each man, lay out streets, and pitch tents.
The Scottish lion, known as the lion rampart, has disappeared from the Tunnock billboards in the London underground, replaced with a sign billing the snack as "Tunnock's Great British teacake".
