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“... had been built in the late 17th century by a ‘pugnacious evangelist and hot-gospeller’ called Joseph Billio, said to have been the inspiration of the phrase ‘fighting like billy-o’. And so this seasoned travel writer goes on, boarding country buses and peering out of the window as England struggles by. After reviewing the Essex coastline, he enters ...”

“... sharing the enthusiasm of Sarkozy, who was eager to reassert French imperial prerogatives in North Africa. The Franco-American friendship began with a mishap. Walking up the stairs of the Elysée palace, Clinton stepped out of her shoe; Sarkozy ‘gracefully took my hand and helped me regain my footing’. She sent him a photo of the incident ...”

“... off Long Island. The charts were often dodgy too. The Scillies were placed fifteen miles too far north, which contributed to the wreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s squadron. I fear that The Coasting Pilot, published by Mount and Page of Tower Hill throughout the 18th century, probably deserves some of the blame, although my ancestors may have partially ...”

“... with ‘German’ Frankfurt. Rebuffed, the Frankfurt assembly proposed a ‘kleindeutsch’ North German state to be ruled by the king of Prussia, but he rejected ‘this invented crown of dirt and clay’. Clark describes the ‘emotionally intense and contagious’ internationalist-nationalism of the first months, represented especially by militant ...”

“... her life.’ The lack is necessarily unassuageable. Unconsciously drawn to Witold as to her true north, she experiences a repeated rhythm of half-formulated expectation and subsequent disappointment in him.Their union is the crux of the story, the point to which it tends as under the pull of a magnet. The crisis occurs two-thirds of the way ...”

“... disorientingly different. It reminded me of an illustration in a book I had as a child of how the north European plain would have looked at the end of the Pleistocene era. Under a grey sky, the flatlands stretched off towards the bright horizon, dotted with isolated trees, bent over by the prevailing wind, like some Friesian veldt. The spring grass, sprouting ...”

“... as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a ...”

“... Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern counties, and one notional, made up of the 26 remaining counties which had Nationalist majorities. Following de Valera’s return at the end of 1920, and various peace feelers, a truce was called from 11 July 1921 and, after preliminary discussions ...”

“... little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by the ...”

“... calls itself the City of the Titanic, as indeed it was, but it has clearly broken out of the dying North Atlantic trading economy whose long decline, and the consequent sectarian battle for working-class jobs, was the economic basis for the current cycle of the Troubles, dating from the hungry 1960s. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, once the busiest in the ...”

“... don’t have the power they once did. He made it into Parliament in 2010 as Conservative MP for North East Somerset and has been there ever since, stiffening the already near-rigid sinews of the Faragist party within a party. His maiden speech in Parliament invoked ‘three great Somerset men’ as his models: Alfred the Great, ‘the first ...”

“... Kershaw’s The End about the last days of Hitler. I turn the page and there is a photograph of Joseph Goebbels inspecting some troops of the Volkssturm in Silesia in March 1945. He’s shaking hands with Willi Hübner, a child of 16, which is unremarkable except that next to Hübner (and also in the Volkssturm) is Peter Cook. He is looking at Goebbels with ...”

“... has turned elves into an endangered species, surviving in numbers only far in the north. Newly built houses have no soul (‘a broken rash of houses … like a ring of pink scum’). Some modern amenities (chip shops) earn grudging approval, most do not. Sightseers leave litter. ‘You found the world easier to master by hands ...”

“... Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took English classes (she had the best attendance) and she was due to graduate that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna ...”

“... in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed.2‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April, 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. Hobsbawm, whose parents had died ...”