“... don’t have the power they once did. He made it into Parliament in 2010 as Conservative MP for North East Somerset and has been there ever since, stiffening the already near-rigid sinews of the Faragist party within a party. His maiden speech in Parliament invoked ‘three great Somerset men’ as his models: Alfred the Great, ‘the first ...”

“... new few months, the Dengie Peninsula in Essex, marshland bounded by the Blackwater Estuary to the north, the River Crouch to the south and an encircling sea wall to the east, became a favourite haunt. These expanses of green are now mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on ...”

“... months of hiding, to believe that their powerful tormentors had really been killed. The roads north filled these vacuums. They were, for miles and miles, rich with the physical realities of war, glutted with evidence of slaughter and victory. They become the great circuit board of the Gulf War, where the disconnectedness stopped. Kelly is talking here ...”

“... way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem into unlikely and unsettling places, and was already at odds ...”

“... accept completely this empirical account of Italy, and of the tensions and inequalities between north and south. The application of a similar kind of dialectical analysis to Britain, however, is still considered, in traditional university circles, to be a matter more of beards and leather jackets than of serious academic discourse. In order to deal with the ...”

“... architects, Carl Schmitt, who, writing on Hamlet, sees in the murder of James I’s father a true north that, although absent in the text itself, orients all its compasses, making England – or, rather, Scotland – the real of Denmark, and the real of medieval Danish politics the modern Elizabethan court. This line of thinking is both appealing and ...”

“... project, to be found in the streets of London, Liverpool and Edinburgh, ‘the Athens of the North’, in William Wilkins’s National Gallery, Elmes, Cockerell and Rawlinson’s St George’s Hall and Robert Smirke’s British Museum. Although the scale and scope of the society’s activities was new, the premise that Greek monuments were valuable ...”

“... All Hear It for Mildred Bailey!’) is Horace. ‘Buried at Springs’ anticipates Bishop’s ‘North Haven’, and there is no shortage of other ‘Bishop moments’, such as ‘More litter, less clutter’ from ‘The Man with the Golden Glow’ or ‘The bay agitatedly tries to smooth itself out./If it were tissue paper it would need damp and an ...”

“... what the perfect servant could do. But Lucy has her dark counterpart in the terrible Miss Kilman, Elizabeth Dalloway’s governess. ‘Bitter and burning’, she is the ugly, angry poor who are always with us, ‘with the power and taciturnity of some prehistoric monster’. But though ancient she is also yet to come. ‘She had always earned her living. Her ...”

“... in public relations for the military, specialising in the missile detection radar that promised North Americans they’d have a good fifteen minutes of warning before any nuclear attack. He took sick leave for depression and had panic attacks; he had been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also ...”

“... electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent protracted Tory dominance has stimulated Celtic protest, just as it did in the late 19th century. What is new, however, is the Thatcherite brand of radicalism which has also worked to ...”

“... to his word, and sets off to meet his doom. His journey takes him into the wilderness – beyond north Wales and somewhere past the Wirral, the poet tells us – and to a mysterious castle. Gawain is warmly welcomed by the lord, who tells him that he is very close to the Green Chapel where the knight resides, and entreats him to stay for the Christmas ...”

“... England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river is a constant in history and the river is history, of a persuasion that reminds me of childhood favourites such as Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and glossed as ‘A ...”

“... and woke up at seven. The Crossroads Women’s Centre is in a mews behind Kentish Town Road in North London: she arrived early with a sandwich, and napped on the sofa as she waited. She wore a black top edged with black and silver plastic jewels, and her wavy blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail. The English Collective of Prostitutes, formed in 1975 with ...”

“... France. The CIA might have avoided SOE’s disastrous errors if it had read London Calling North Pole by the Abwehr’s Major Hermann Giskes, who had run that operation.In 1956 Sichel moved to Hong Kong, where the agency had its eyes on China and Indonesia. When Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, proposed sending commandos into ...”