“... of these characters, but so too was escaping it, if only to return. That place was usually the North of England (Myers was born in County Durham and moved to London to live in a squat and write for Melody Maker, before settling in Hebden Bridge). It was a place where it was often raining, rain that fell ‘with timeless Northern fury’, or like ...”

“... of Mandu stands high on a rocky plateau above the plains of central India. It is entered from the north; after a tortuous dusty ascent from Dhar, the road squeezes between two stone bastions and enters through the Delhi Darwaza, or Delhi Gate, where the remains of inset blue enamel can be seen on the dilapidated sandstone archways. Up this road and through ...”

“... for his homeland, which he once contrived to revisit. His sons are wholly Australian. In a pub up north, Arkady and the author meet a policeman who has thought of a marvellous title for a bestseller, to rival Killer’s Pay-Off, Shark City or The Day of the Dog. Convinced he can sell it for 50,000 US dollars, he is reluctant to impart it to the author except ...”

“... the Treaty ports came up for review, it may well have been the existence of that bridgehead in the North-East which allowed the Chiefs of Staff to describe the ports as an ‘awkward commitment’. It was, as Fisk points out, the first time that the military had ever wavered in their defence of the territorial imperative. An opening was created for de Valera ...”

“... an elegiac vignette of the disasters of Polish history, partly the story of a visit Schama paid to north-eastern Poland in search of – he is not quite sure what, but it was somewhere there that his mother’s grandfather, a Jewish lumberjack in the great forest, had lived and worked. The two following chapters contrast the different ways in which the forest ...”

“... Her agreement with Putnam for three more Scarpetta mysteries guaranteed her $24 million for the North American rights. British rights were disposed of to Little, Brown and their paperback subsidiary Warner Books for a reported £2 million. A film of From Potter’s Field is in production. An exultant Cornwell described the Putnam deal as ‘the biggest ever ...”

“... Yesino.Yerofeev’s father, appropriately enough, was a stationmaster at Poyakonda in the far North, who, in the purge year of 1938, when his son was born, made the mistake, in his cups, of criticising the regime, and got 15 years in a gulag. Brought up in an orphanage, the young Yerofeev did brilliantly at school (the Soviet system had no choice but to ...”

“... mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had ...”

“... For many people the BBC Foreign Affairs Editor John Simpson, who stayed behind in Baghdad when Armageddon was scheduled to begin, was the civilian hero of the Gulf War. The only thing that may have puzzled them was his title. How could a man edit reports coming from all quarters of the globe if he deliberately isolated himself under conditions of siege? On this matter From the House of War provides little help, except for a passing reference to the author’s ‘rather empty title’, which apparently carries important psychological impact when dealing with Iraqi (and other) civil servants, perhaps pandering, in the case of the Iraqis, to their notion that the whole world ought to be edited from Baghdad ...”

“... is generated by wind, and the country lies becalmed, breezeless. It’s blowing a gale off the north-west coast, but the waters there are too deep for wind farms. There are practical ways of storing wind energy, but none has been built on a big enough scale. Most of the country’s coal-fired power stations have been shut down. Both reactors at Hartlepool ...”

“... him with a fund of experiences which he later enriched by further adventures in Texas, Mexico and North Africa. His travel sketches and accounts of experiences and characters met with in these adventures constitute an important part of his literary output. He returned to Scotland on his father’s death in 1883 and settled on his ancestral estate of Gartmore ...”

“... to the municipalities and shires, and that the benefits of globalisation would trickle down to the North of England. ‘It all adds up to forty years of neoliberalism that have not been kind to the North of England,’ he said. ‘Forty years of trickle-down economics that did not, in the end, trickle down very much at all ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped ...”

“... satire on the town as the evil headquarters of imperial oppression, the icy giant of the North. ‘Naturally I despise my country from head to foot,’ wrote Pushkin, ‘but I am not going to let a foreigner get away with sharing that feeling.’ Here is how a Russian writes a poem about his own tyranny, he seems to say. ‘It was the best of ...”

“... were evermore barking and baying (as an ancient writer saith) about the Roman Empire.’ The north-south divide was clearly legible on the landscape. Camden’s account of an island separated by Roman-inspired civility was not seriously challenged until the 18th century. Hingley presents a careful and detailed history of antiquarian accounts of the wall ...”