“... sentence for assaulting a nine-year-old relative: They release you from prison at 10.55 a.m. The North East is bright and sunny [as it often isn’t]. Your mission [as you explained it to another prisoner] is to get the gun, shoot Sam, shoot her new boyfriend, shoot Sam’s mum for trying to split you up, shoot the social worker who pissed you off, shoot the ...”

“... to draw on for her prose. It shows when she muses about Diana’s final moments after Henri Paul arrived ‘to drive her away through celebrity’s electric storm. Does she think then of her sons, asleep in a Scottish castle? As she slides quickly into the back seat of the Mercedes on that close Parisian night, does she suddenly miss the cool English ...”

“... of railways. He visited the medieval towns of Yaroslavl and Smolensk, went deep into Siberia and north to the Solovetsky islands, and travelled south to Bukhara and Samarkand, Central Asian cities colonised over the preceding century. He photographed churches and monasteries, factories and waterways, landscapes and natural wonders, famous people ...”

“... ritualised way of life. These meanings have held fast for centuries. The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1874 that ‘colonisation is a considered act, subject to rules, which can only originate in highly advanced societies. Savages and barbarians sometimes – even often – emigrate [but] only civilised peoples colonise.’The ...”

“... adds, ‘it was like coming home.’ But to which home? Bob could buy several small towns in the North of England and still have enough money to buy Zanzibar, and I don’t mean the nightclub in Uxbridge. He was a winner in a year when many people weren’t, and that’s the big news from this year’s Rich List: the number of billionaires is down for the ...”

“... armourers!’ The Argentine Air Force lost 74 strike aircraft during the Falklands campaign. Dr Paul Rogers, defence analyst at the University of Bradford, can show that they have been replaced by at least 107 new aircraft. In April 1982, only five Argentine aircraft were capable of delivering air-to-surface Exocet missiles. The number has now swollen to ...”

“... Mandelstam.Vallejo was born in 1892, the youngest of eleven children, in an Andean town in the north of Peru. Using the word for a child of mixed heritage (his father was white, his mother was Indigenous), he referred to himself as ‘your unforgettable cholo’; ‘machetón’ (‘big machete’) is what his schoolmates called him, on account of his ...”

“... to the ‘Field Day’ standpoint has already been mooted in the essay on Seamus Heaney’s North: she dislikes the practice of equating one set of circumstances with another, without sufficiently allowing for the differences between the two. Hence, she says, Heaney’s Iron Age Danish excavations yield up material so alien to contemporary Ireland that ...”

“... are no closer to his material objects than Thomas Hardy’s, for all that the former came from the North-East and the latter from the South-West. The relationship between language and the world is not a spatial one, any more than the relation between a spade and the act of digging with it. The celebrated ‘materiality’ of a poet like Heaney is really a ...”

“... notion for cartographers and their historians. Sometimes it means plain old accuracy: there is no North-West Passage emanating from Hudson Bay; there are continents beyond the Mediterranean ‘oecumene’ – the ‘inhabited world’. Only ignorance and deliberate falsehood sin against this standard of objectivity. When scientific cartographers worry about ...”

“... peace in the early hours of the morning while playing a drunken game of bicycle polo with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He insisted that behaving this way was his birthright and that he had merely been entertaining those he had woken up. What made all the difference was war and the Guards. All four joined up, keen to do their duty but also to see action; the ...”

“... as nearly as humans can to the processes of nature itself. If you look at the photographs by Paul van Vlissingen taken monthly from one August to the next at Rudha Cailleach, or Witches’ Point, on the north shore of Loch Maree, you find you’re watching a mobile image, pregnant in each of its 13 stages, the more so ...”

“... was a communist. The artists designated ‘masters’ at the Bauhaus, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, were no less diverse, as were the few women who rose to prominence through the workshops. That rise was rare in art schools of the time; today, however, the textiles of Anni Albers, the photographs of Lucia Moholy and the design ...”

“... who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice.’) But in looking to a fantasy north-west for salvation she was borrowing from the stranded Anglo-Australian tribe in which she was raised. A whole people misplaced, continuing to perform ‘airless episodes of England’ long after they were out of date: ‘Refinement was maintained on the ...”

“... diversity of accents matching each actor’s distinctive shape, skin and race. A diminutive North African Jew as elephant-headed Ganesha, then as Krishna. Vyasa, the bard of the poem, a ginger-haired Gascon. Tiny, tightbound Japanese, long-limbed loping Senegalese, pale-skinned Germans and Poles, a wide-lipped Lebanese, a princess with streaming black ...”