“... of slurry – you’d think crossing the road might be a little easier than the journey up the north face of the Eiger. Not necessarily. The crossing has traffic lights but they don’t really work. They work on paper: the green man appears and stays there for a little less than five seconds, which is just about enough time for a purposeful 21-year-old ...”

“... the Civil War struggle at a frontier not simply between east and west, but also between north and south.’ The Appalachian Mountains were one of the safer routes used by the Underground Railroad, and Appalachian was said to be an early Indian term for ‘new world’. Graham’s first scenario – sent to Copland in July 1942 with the title ...”

“... I might,’ reflectively, with caution, as an arctic explorer when asked if he will winter up north again next year might reply uncommittingly to a reporter. Highsmith, who has said that she ‘never thinks about style’, has developed a distinctive prose which catches the obsessions of her protagonists, their dogged attention to detail, and their ...”

“... with a battalion of the British Eighth Army in victorious occupation of Gorizia, some thirty miles north of Trieste. We shared the town with a brigade of Yugoslav Partisans, and the relations between us were not good. Our lords and masters had decreed that the Partisans should be, for the time being, in charge of civil administration, while we confined ...”

“... were, in art and life, part of Capa’s style. Whelan demythologises Capa without being sour. John Hersey wrote that ‘despite all his inventions and postures Capa has somewhere at his centre a reality. This is his talent’ – and described that talent as you might an actor’s or a gambler’s. Perhaps the wars he covered encouraged that kind of ...”

“... loved, and some of them behave as underdogs, which only ramps up the need. (A dedication ‘to North Korea’ would be something else.) Crawford’s interest in places has never been confined to the country he lives in and calls his own. The following is from his poem ‘Planetist’: I love all windy, grand designs, all blashes Splattering the ...”

“... of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner. But this kind of showy reputation is not ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who tweeted ‘he has no economic policies’). Corbyn’s former policy chief, Neale ...”

“... of mise en scène and all-round plausibility, The Emperor of Ocean Park lies somewhere south of John Grisham and north of Nancy Drew. It is long-winded, shoddily put together and riddled with repetitions and small inconsistencies: characters are introduced twice, facts stated and restated as if for the first time; a pool ...”

“... the Whites were beaten. He next became a sailor, joined the French Foreign Legion, got wounded in North Africa, and at last went back to his Classical studies, first at the Sorbonne and later, in the Thirties, at Cambridge. There he dabbled in Tolstoyism with Wittgenstein before going to teach Classics at the University of Southampton. In 1939 he moved to ...”

“... Went to Haiti (‘And practically all Haiti had Katie)’, ‘All of You’ (‘the east, west, north and the south of you’). Even as his songs were stopping the show, they were slipping it to the paying customers. At one point, in ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ from Porter’s most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Bianca and her suitors sing in ...”

“... and then killed in December 1989 – I took the train up to the Jiu Valley. It jolted and squealed north to the city of Brasov, then west through the Transylvanian Alps to Petrosani, the central town in the Valley. It was after midnight when we arrived; a late-night kiosk had some bread and chocolate; the hotel was surly, cold and dingy. Yet from my bedroom ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... familiar on the canvasses of Streeton and Roberts, to a harsher and more elemental environment north of the Capricorn. Here the bush legend is turned inside out. The reliance on Aboriginal stockmen and concubines calls the racial and sexual foundations of colonial society into question. Similarly, her treatment of Belief shows the imposition of ...”