“... comfort of snow and ice, in eloquent emptiness, however much Larkin professed to hope that ‘the north ship will come back instead of being bogged up there in a glacier.’ What you desire is not yourself, because your self is still haplessly if hopelessly alive and ongoing, but the absence which mysteriously becomes sex itself, preserved in Katherine who is ...”

“... was merely for the domestic consumption of the gentry themselves. Just as the industrial North bust up the slave-owning Southern States of the US, 19th-century capitalism broke into the cosy domesticity of vodka production. Pokhlebkin believes that capitalism’s effect on the quality of vodka ‘was disastrous for the common people’, who were ...”

“... midland counties of England’ with ‘the pine trees and vices of the south’. (Not of the north, interestingly enough. Gothicism never took root in the Scottish background which Sir Walter had made his own, and where even barbarous old custom was healthy and bracing as well as picturesque.) Yet like the Magic Realists Angela Carter used the genre to ...”

“... the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s imagination it’s more likely to have been in Aldeburgh. Although Dickens never went there, he knew and admired George Crabbe’s The Borough, which describes Aldeburgh’s workhouse as archetypically ...”

“... specific target, in this as in much of his previous scholarly work, is the British colonies in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. His initial hypothesis, and ultimate conclusion, is that ‘the report of the senses was of immense importance’ to the people who lived there and then. However, early America is, for Hoffer, simply a convenient ...”

“... of accents, while dated, bring into earshot a teeming cast of characters – East Enders, posh North Londoners, Italian immigrants and so on.As a child Gilroy was considered ‘sickly’, and at the age of two was given over to the care of her maternal grandparents, who lived in the region of Berbice, looking across the Corentyne estuary towards Dutch ...”

“... coal fires, false teeth, ukeleles, wedding photos and Co-ops associated with this part of the North (but not the greyhounds, braces and tin baths a less informed observer would have gone for). Continuous has a full complement of characters who in Harrison’s hands avoid becoming ‘characters’: Ethel Jowett, next door, who loved the D’Oyly Carte and ...”

“... On 3 April 1986, at his filling-station in north Dallas, Billy Jack Mason was protesting about the fall in the price of oil. Cars came from as far as Waco, and by breakfast, the queue was six miles long. He was offering unleaded at zero cents a gallon. Reporters sought Billy’s opinion on the future. ‘That’s overseas ...”

“... century. Yet with the passage of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative ...”

“... a coffee and took a flight to South Bend without leaving O’Hare.’ In South Bend he was met by John Matthias, poet, anthologist of the splendid and hugely influential 23 Modern British Poets (1971), published in Chicago, and professor at Notre Dame University. Shortly after Fisher arrived in South Bend, as Matthias remembered in an essay, they drove ...”

“... with an archaic intensity – as if body, fabric and landscape were all one. Here is farmer John Radcliffe, a mass of creases and mud, stitched and darned repairs. His cat has crept into shot. When Killip brought Radcliffe a print of this photograph, he folded it carefully till it could vanish into his coat pocket.In 1975, Killip was awarded a two-year ...”

“... How far were they prepared to go by turning the idea of an exclusionary frontier between Global North and Global South into a career opportunity? Five of the 13 invited submitted entries, including an exquisite ‘glass forest’ by Eric Owen Moss, a practice in Culver City, LA. The most sinister submission was from Antoine Predock, a practice in ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... of 100,000 uplifting exhibits, and then, spurning the paltry pleasures of the capital, travel back north on the next night train, thus losing only one day’s wages and saving the expense and indignity of Cockney lodgings. This decent fellow could also qualify for an unadvertised experience, rendered possible by teamwork on the part of Science, Art and ...”

“... Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and stylistic sophistication of his writing seem almost other-worldly, though legend has it that his distinctive accent derives from a small community of Channel Islanders in New Zealand ...”