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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... for Company.) Before the 1981 trial of Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 murders he committed in the North of England between 1975 and 1980, Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney-General, rose to tell the Judge that the Crown was dropping the charge of murder in favour of a guilty plea for manslaughter. Havers said that all the evidence tended towards the conclusion ...”

“... were grounds for suspicion, Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered 14 or 15 youths in North London over a period of five years, would have been rounded up with the rest of us. But there were no grounds for suspecting anyone of being guilty of these murders, for until the grim day in February two years ago when a plumber found human remains in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sometimes mad, often funny and always stoned – leads his readers on a tour of Vietnam, south to north and south again into Cambodia. He frequently visits the DMZ, the old Demilitarised Zone, the symbol of Vietnam’s artificial bifurcation by the Western powers, at American insistence, in 1954. Fittingly, Page’s tale ends in the DMZ, where American ...”

“... Scotland’s regions. The Hudson’s Bay Company was staffed by Orcadians; its Canadian rival, the North West Company, was run by Highlanders; the sugar plantations of Jamaica were packed with younger sons of Argyllshire lairds; the great trading houses of South-East Asia were mostly family businesses from Aberdeen and ...”