“... on their noses. I didn’t choose Wimbledon because of any local connection (I grew up in North London) but because I had seen them on TV in the mid-1970s, where they featured as non-league FA Cup giant-killers, or at least giant-stunners, holding the mighty Leeds United to a goalless draw before losing 1-0 in the replay. When Wimbledon were invited ...”

“... the original, itself somewhat pretentious on occasion, is distorted into scholarly babble: the North ‘was precisely where a new type of recourse took shape, fanned by the temptation to return sincerely to nature’ renders ‘c’est au nord que se dessine un nouveau recours, que gonfle la tentation du retour à l’authentique nature.’ Where the ...”

“... the talent of Keith Richard), his preoccupation with the Travelling Man (the narrator is driving north to Canada, and later seems to cover most of the freeways of America), and his superstitious belief in the interventions of Fate (the driver hits a black raven, killing it, and then follows the voice of the raven’s feather instructing him to deliver it to ...”

“... the death of her husband she spent most of a decade abroad (a good deal of it as a teacher in North American universities) chanting over to herself with satisfaction: ‘I’m no longer in New Zealand.’ What these writers gained from being New Zealanders, I think, was the same in each case – the lack of any profoundly etched social identity, so that ...”

“... senior thesis at Reed College in faraway Oregon and in graduate school at Duke in not much closer North Carolina. In 1982 he published Death in a Promised Land, a pioneering account that remains the starting point for anyone learning about the massacre. The work did not gain a large readership, though Ellsworth tells us that it was among the books most ...”

“... in response to local pressures, regulating the food market and nationalising the coalmines in the north, whose operators had collaborated with the Nazis. In southern France, where communist-dominated resistance networks remained active, the state came under pressure to carry out significant purges of the police force, many of whose members had compromised ...”

“... Great Basin, so called because its scanty water doesn’t drain to any sea, is mostly a terrain of north-south-running ranges, sharp-edged raw geology, separated by flat expanses of sagebrush. In the desert, plants grow further apart to accommodate the huge root systems they need to collect enough water to live, and so do communities and ranches. Few but the ...”

“... on the Western Front increased from 3.25 million to more than four million men by April 1918. Paul von Hindenburg, a stolid general who effectively replaced the kaiser as the figurehead of the German war effort after being brought out of retirement to win spectacular victories on the Eastern Front early in the war, and Quartermaster-General Erich ...”

“... in September 2003, and another into incidents that occurred in May 2004 at a British army base north of Basra, while a third inquiry has been requested on behalf of 102 other Iraqi citizens. Since Cameron’s announcement WikiLeaks has suggested that there may well be 15,000 hitherto unrecorded Iraqi deaths, leading the Guardian to request, under the ...”

“... the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood arrive at a swanky restaurant called Chez Paul to try and persuade their old trumpet player, Mr Fabulous, to rejoin the band. ‘From the start,’ Klein writes, ‘it was obvious that Woody was going to be in rare form that night. He swooped down on the hors d’oeuvres and gathered clumps of them in ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... against France. Howard shows that France was suspicious of British and American designs on French North Africa and Madagascar too. France faced nationalist resistance in all these places, but consistently imagined that the resistance was being fomented by London and Washington. Howard says nothing about Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, which was taken by ...”

“... O’Rowe, which first aired in 2020. One of the reasons the TV series bettered the novel, I think (Paul Mescal aside, come on), was that the ending was more realistic. In the final episode Marianne tells Connell, who is considering studying in New York, that they’ll be all right. In the novel, she says she’ll ‘always be here’. There is some ambiguity ...”

“... Here they come, marching north out of Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears ...”

“... platinum cloak with her comic entourage of ravens and spiders. The heroes were a boy and a brave, north-travelling girl. At one point the Snow Queen stormed off stage-left in her silver sledge, and had she kept going, putting a girdle round the earth, she’d have been following the 56th parallel. Up the Nethergate, out of Dundee, across Scotland, away over ...”