“... the North Sea, has neither the geographic nor historical glamour of the mountains to its north and west, but it was, until his own time, the seat of what Gibbon, a communist sympathiser, called ‘a dual power’: good soil, ‘under the sleet, churned and pelted’, and the tenant farmer precariat, who were unprotected, even, by the Crofters Holdings Act of ...”

“... his photo uploaded and his background details included, his ‘education’, his football team (West Ham), and the fact that he now worked as a driver for a firm called Executive Cars. It was at this point that Ronnie’s ‘character’ began to veer off on its own, as characters do when you’re creating them in fiction. Ronnie, it turned out, was quite ...”

“... a sun-bleached cloth poppy fastened to the back rest. It’s a memorial to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died ...”

“... where he was reunited with his mother. The following day, a Sunderland Echo reporter called Nigel Green drove Heron from the monastery to Morpeth railway station. ‘He was terrified of being recognised,’ Green told me. ‘I bought him a baseball cap and put him on a train to Scotland.’ Green took a photograph before he left: there are blurred ...”

“... to benefit.It was not long before any such linear prospect was in trouble. At the Treasury, Nigel Lawson had pressed for British entry into the Community’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1985, and when Thatcher vetoed this, shadowed it nonetheless. By 1989 the economy – pumped up by Lawson to secure Thatcher’s third electoral victory in 1987 ...”

“... warning to immigrants in a place, once Labour through and through, that has fallen hard for Nigel Farage. Blyth was for generations a skilled labourers’ town, a place of shipbuilding, coal shipping and coal mining. But these old industries have vanished as completely as if they were never there, and most of the people who worked in them are ...”