“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Maconochie, who arrived in Hobart in 1837 as secretary to a new governor, the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. Like Macquarie, he soon drew attacks from those who wanted no reforms. Scots tended, it would seem, to be either worse than the common run of English functionaries, or far superior. But between the place of Scotsmen and Irishmen in Australia there ...”

“... in a bin, ignoring the calls about a meeting with a fatuous scriptwriter, takes a train as far north as he can, and lies down on the track. ‘What a relief, to be finished, finished with it all for good.’ But then suddenly, a 12-year-old girl: mixed race, clothes ‘too thin for the north of Scotland’, crouching on ...”

“... down in a stream with her legs in the air. Footprints incriminate Edith’s estranged husband, John, who had left her for a barmaid nine years previously. Shardlake suspects John Boleyn has been framed. If he hangs, which seems likely, it would scandalise Elizabeth, who orders an investigation and wants him pardoned if ...”

“... civilised Fellow Subjects.’ Before he could issue his Notice, word came of another massacre up north, at Myall Creek, in which 28 Aborigines died at the hands of 12 convict stockmen. Gipps had seven of the perpetrators tried and eventually hanged – the first time whites had been executed for killing blacks. But in the furore surrounding the trials, his ...”

“... men and women had served in the RAF and worked as technicians and electricians in factories in the North-West during World War Two. Nocturnal Soho was crammed with illicit dens and clubs in which East End racketeers, West African stowaways and black GIs smoked one joint after another and frittered away their scant earnings on illegal gambling and drinking ...”