“... footage showing Britain from space. Cut again to another drone shot, heading inland from the North Sea this time, as far from Old Harry Rocks as you can get in the British Isles, towards Muckle Flugga lighthouse in the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, to watch a pod of orca hunting for seals.The narrative rhythms of such sequences are by now firmly ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we took the leis from ...”

“... in a doomsday vault in Svalbard in case of ‘apocalyptic extinction events’, as he called them. John was wearing a plaid shirt and a poacher’s jacket; his moustache drooped and his teeth were furred with plaque. He said he was a hunter and forager. I asked him what this involved and he told me he collected nuts and berries on Walthamstow marshes and ate ...”

“... in 1920, which first partitioned Ireland, to the Northern Ireland Protocol in 2019, which kept the North inside the EU single market for goods by means of an open border to the Republic, the question of Irish unity or disunity has never gone away. But although nationalists have always opposed partition, only recently have most seen ending it as a feasible ...”

“... Susan Carruthers sets out to explore the long and surprisingly complicated story of the ‘Dear John’ break-up letter sent by American women to US troops serving overseas. But her account offers insights into a broader entanglement, involving the militarism that shores up modern nationhood; the emotional and sexual ties that sustain and can destroy men in ...”

“... and guerrilla warfare in the South, and serious fighting across the dividing line between North and South, the 38th Parallel. The peasant uprisings of late 1946 involved millions of people. In late 1948, shortly after the US had formally transmitted power to a South Korean regime headed by Syngman Rhee (and opposed by virtually all other political ...”

“... If they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings about Northern Catholics a stage ...”

“... associations of the term ‘coalition’ are deep-rooted in British politics. The short-lived Fox-North coalition of 1783 became a byword for low cynicism and a willingness to seize power at whatever cost. According to George III, it was ‘the most daring and unprincipled faction that the annals of the kingdom ever produced’. Military defeat in the ...”

“... of Tromsø, a wind-lashed port standing precariously on the western coast of Norway, 69.7 degrees North – beyond the Arctic Circle. The inhabitants are proud of their small city, inaccurately called the ‘Paris of the North’ or, more realistically, ‘the Gateway to the Arctic’. It’s a quiet place, bleached by the ...”

“... past the Girdle Ness lighthouse, bringing us to Aberdeen after long stravaigs from Vatersay north to Lewis, through Easter Ross to Caithness, Rousay in Orkney, Yell and Unst in Shetland, searching for people whose forebears were evicted one hundred and fifty years ago. On the hill slope to southward I look out as usual for the four black pinnacles on ...”

“... brutal in his methods and determined to reunite the peninsula under his own control. In the North, from among the Communist factions encouraged by the Soviet authorities, a comparable figure emerged in Kim Il Sung – a man no less ruthless and implacable in his ambitions and equally impatient of foreign direction. Reunification became impossible. A ...”

“... frames: dense colour becomes a peep-hole. Sunlight flashing on pebbles beneath a fast stream. John Clare, in ‘Recollections after a Ramble’, writes of sitting by the banks of a river and thinking: ‘If I tumbled in/I should fall direct to heaven.’ The wet colour is hazy, soft; it does its best to subvert the over-emphatic actuality of the borrowed ...”

“... for investigating fraudulent currency, claimed that these ‘supernotes’ were printed in North Korea, though it wasn’t clear how the intaglio printer, cotton-linen paper and colour-shifting ink had ended up there. Even so, numerous clues pointed in that direction. In 1996, Yoshimi Tanaka, a former member of the Japanese Red Army Faction, was ...”

“... that previously have never counted for much in the Anglophone version of medieval Europe: the far north of Scotland, Poland, the eastern reaches of Germany, southern Italy, the islands of the Mediterranean and the outer boundaries of the Turkish empire. He breaks apart traditional notions of literary history and rebuilds them with an inspiringly new attention ...”

“... for a united Ireland and the defence of the civil rights of the minority population in the North. The blurring of the all-important demarcation line between these two issues has been a hallmark of IRA strategy, which consistently depicts its Armalite-laden cadres as ‘defenders’ of the Catholic population of the ...”