“... of the prison complex cover part of what was once a railway marshalling yard, some two miles north of March, just off the road to Wisbech. A weld-mesh fence more than five metres in height surrounds it; beyond that there is an equally high wall particularly difficult to negotiate because at the top there is an anti-escape ‘beak’, a smooth tubular ...”

“... where Iceland stood on Elizabethan maps. By 1600, ‘Thule’ could mean anywhere in the frozen north. The first writer to mention Thule was Pytheas, in the fourth century BC, for whom it was an island somewhere north of Britain. The Greek word for a written account of such a voyage as Pytheas’ was periodos, a ‘going ...”

“... 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him. He seems to have been immune to such essentially human feelings. Carlyle happened to be in the library in 1875 when Bryan Courthope ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have ...”

“... this expression in figurative usage was General Montgomery’s prediction, during his victorious North African campaign in 1942-3, that the British 8th Army would ‘knock the enemy for six out of Africa’). If boxing jargon offers metaphors of competition and debate, the language of cricket projects a kind of noble defensiveness, flawless ...”

“... in the BL to catch the attention of a beautiful red-haired girl, Anna, at the next table in the North Reading Room. Stopping only for a gulped pint at the Museum Tavern, he’s promptly at her flat in Bedford Square rolling with her on the kitchen floor, admiring his own seductive moves like a sexier Jim Dixon. For anyone who has actually worked at the ...”

“... different style. I’d never heard anything like it,’ Count Basie said. In time he employed her. John Hammond, the pioneering record producer who ‘discovered’ Holiday, said: she ‘changed my musical tastes and my music life’; she ‘sang like an improvising jazz genius’. ‘I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn. I try to ...”

“... youthful Davie. ‘Our argute voices vied among the bracken.’   My sixth-form prize from the North Was Ronald Bottrall’s Festivals of Fire,   My own precocious choice. In ‘Hampshire’, one of Davie’s delightful and moving Shire sequences, written in 1974, the youthful poet confides these early inspirations to ‘a willowy Wren’ who ...”

“... when he died. All had been lifted from Fincham’s ‘twopenny library’ on Colchester’s North Hill by my grandmother. Her modus operandi was simple. A regular and trusted customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want unwittingly to take the same one ...”

“... of several hundred reefs, sometimes tens of kilometres long. There are nearly a hundred in the north-east Atlantic alone; the largest are the Darwin Mounds, discovered in 1998 a thousand metres down and two hundred kilometres north-west of Cape Wrath. Deep-water reefs support large fish populations and are often ...”

“... Dunton and George Borrow – then over seventy – he would bathe in the Putney ponds ‘with a north-east wind cutting across the icy waters like a razor’. No towels of course: Borrow would run about the grass like an elderly dog, shaking himself to get dry. For Coleridge and De Quincy, immersion was a more metaphorical matter: ‘silent, with swimming ...”

“... amassing vast amounts of property there, both on Manhattan Island and in the hinterland to the north. In the mid-1730s he proposed that his nephew ‘settle’ and develop a large portion of these holdings; the young man (now just past 20) fairly leapt at the chance. Soon William had converted to Protestantism, and left Ireland – for good, as it turned ...”

“... you want better than you know it yourself goes back at least as far as the 17th century. Roger North, an amateur architect whose only substantial extant work is the gateway to the Middle Temple, wrote a treatise on building in the mid-169Os. It trenchantly affirms amateur virtues: ‘where a man builds for his owne use, none can contrive well but ...”

“... a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh term, Johnians. The LRB asked Blair to write a piece, and he did. Its left-is-best vibe makes entertaining reading now, but it’s well written and at least ...”