“... little introduction to the Dolan book in which he remembers how ‘as the political crisis in the North lengthened, I began to feel the need for a dictionary which would gather innumerable local words from all parts of Ireland together – a hospitable inclusive text which, without triumphalism, would be a national dictionary. This Dictionary of ...”

“... pretty Yorkshirewoman, called Bertha Wharton, who had married a German Jew from Bradford, called Paul Sigismund Nathan, presented here as something of a schlemiel. When Bertha was annoyed with Paul, she called him a ‘fleyboggard’ and then brooded romantically about her ancestry. Michael recalls: ‘A shadowy greatness ...”

“... questioning, notably by Tarn Dalyell,* coupled with inquiries from journalists such as Paul Foot and from defence analysts, has shown that all of these assertions are false. The Conqueror had been shadowing the cruiser for over thirty hours with orders to attack only if it entered the exclusion zone, but these orders were suddenly changed to an ...”

“... food,’ exhorts the cover of The Official Foodie Handbook. One of the ironies resulting from the North/South dichotomy of our planet is the appearance of this odd little book, a vade mecum to a widespread and unashamed cult of conspicuous gluttony in the advanced industrialised countries, at just the time when Ethiopia is struck by a widely publicised ...”

“... best bookstore-café, there’s a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller ...”

“... based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There was a similar furore a year or two later when there was some evidence (though not much) that a senior policeman in Sheffield had threatened to beat a suspect with a rhino ...”

“... road is a no man’s land on the edge of society,’ Rupert Martin wrote in 1983, introducing Paul Graham’s photo­graphs of the A1, ‘and its inhabitants – the staff of cafés or hotels, the lorry drivers, salesmen and others who ply the road – are often imbued with a solitary stoicism, a kind of self-sufficient melancholy.’ There are those for ...”

“... readers, encouraging them to fantasise that the world of Brideshead Revisited can still be found north of the 49th parallel. Yet such Anglicised social comedy, often placed in an academic setting, seems to me the weakest component of his fiction (apart from having very little to do with the realities of Canadian academic life). The institutions that Davies ...”

“... One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the Crown, a testament to the uneasy. Forster-like imperial conscience of a pre-Thatcherite age. In foreign affairs, Mrs Thatcher’s experience was slight ... This is masterly. The introduction of ...”

“... only five SDP candidates were elected – two of them in traditional Liberal seats in the far north of Scotland and two in Labour’s heartlands in South-East London. (The fifth was the party leader, in Plymouth.) Labour’s candidate in the Greenwich by-election which started this rot was Deirdre Wood. She had been a tremendous supporter of Ken ...”

“... Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed. In his first stories, for example, the natives are shining examples of naked otherness, created partly to refresh our view concerning the mixture of simplicity, guile and sexual beauty available in remote places ...”

“... own national assemblies. In Southern Europe, these are generally much lower than those of the North, because it’s assumed that deputies will maximise the perks of office. The notion that expenses should be validated by receipts would greatly increase the load on the generally less efficient bureaucracies of the South. The pragmatic solution therefore is ...”

“... Irish national cause which had been his unchallenged possession for over a decade. Harried around North Kilkenny to the cry of ‘Tally-ho’ by ‘hounds like Davitt’ (his own phrase) who had been his colleagues a few weeks earlier, Parnell was stripped of the aloofness that had been his trademark and forced into the mud of a contest that deprived not only ...”

“... not necessarily inimical to the spirit of efficiency. James Martens sees a divergence between a North of England rugby infused with the competitiveness and emphasis on success of the entrepreneurial class which ran it, and a Southern game played for comradeship, fun and character-building by clubs based on occupational or educational affiliation or ...”