“... became pregnant, they decided to come back to England, moving into a flat in Chalcot Square in North London in January 1960. Frieda was born at home and had her first bath in Sylvia’s biggest pyrex dish. ‘I don’t know when I’ve been so happy,’ she wrote home. Ted had held a mirror so she could see Frieda being born, and wrote to a friend that the ...”

“... For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite ...”

“... for a start, the same Ayatollah as the one who had gone pimping with Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in order to arm the colonial mercenaries in Nicaragua who had been so eloquently opposed by Salman Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile? Or was it the other Ayatollah, the genial friend of Kurdistan? The ally of the women of Persia? Who but an effete Westerner would ...”

“... this uncelebrated railway halt, navigates by revulsion. Starting on Tottenham Court Road, he heads north, always choosing the worst option when the path divides. ‘Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time … Here the city gives up the game.’ It wasn’t just Tebbit who ...”

“... say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. It gives virgin readers an opportunity to see what all the ...”

“... with their own deep violence was ever likely to occur. Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina was due to speak that first day, a black man deeply committed to the happy fiction that Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of violent talk who opposes violence when it touches the ...”

“... was awry, he would rush off to look for his diary with the yellow Post-it. This was his polar north, and as long as it could be located, he seemed to be in contact, just, with a reality that was slipping away. Sometimes he would lose the Post-it and painstakingly write out a new one. Gradually, he lost track of the way the letters were organised, and the ...”

“... is used for ‘he’ and ‘she’, and sometimes for ‘it’ as well. In Ojibwe, an indigenous North American language whose nouns are not classified by gender but according to whether they are considered animate or not, the singular third person pronoun wiin is used for both ‘she’ and ‘he’. In Turkish, the equivalent of ‘he’, ‘she’ and ...”

“... nor loyalists to tell the truth, while 92 per cent didn’t trust the British state either. As Susan McKay describes in Bear in Mind These Dead (2008), nationalist and unionist communities have both at times brandished their grief at one another; in the mid-2000s, they held rival victims’ demonstrations in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Even agreeing ...”

“... was not just a negative condition of the unfolding of this crisis; it was an active catalyst. As Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy, the commanding scholarly work on the break-up of Yugoslavia, puts it, As early as 1989 Western governments began to declare that the central European countries were better prepared to make the economic and political transition ...”

“... the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side. Judge Masipa’s entry ...”

“... intrude on your privacy, but we’re both wearing your underpants.’ Calvin Klein is sitting with Susan Sontag. Actually he isn’t but if he were it would sum up what celebrity means in New York.22 May. Watch the second programme in the BBC2 series It’s Not Unusual, in which gays and lesbians, many in their seventies and eighties, recall their experiences ...”

“... but I was unable to explain why.The Arctic would have been easier, but I had no desire to head North. I wanted white and ice as far as the eye could see, and I wanted it in the one place in the world which was uninhabited. I wanted my white bedroom extended beyond reason. I wanted a place where Sister Winniki couldn’t exist. That was Antarctica, and only ...”

“... as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a ...”

“... her sister Maria, and is remembered for clinging on to her Cornwall habits in the cold and windy north: wearing silk dresses and clipping around the stone floors in her pattens. We meet Tabby and the other servants, the curates and the local families with whom the Brontës interacted. The Diary Papers introduce all their beloved pets; cats and dogs ...”