“... to negotiate a course through the vast, multitudinous, close-set and ice-locked archipelago to the north of the American continent. The ice is now melting: within 25 years the Arctic Ocean will probably be entirely free of ice during the summer; some climate researchers believe it could happen as soon as 2013. (Mapping the effects of climate change is one of ...”

“... honour. Three of the contributors do, however, engage Kermode’s thought in a fairly serious way: John Stokes, George Hunter and Patrick Parrinder. Two ways of doing so were possible. Either Kermode’s general view of the critic’s task or his ideas concerning specific texts or groups of texts could have been the focus of attention. Stokes and Hunter choose ...”

“... In the same spirit the best troops on the Wall in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill are ‘North British’ auxiliaries, i.e. the Scots. Kipling’s parallel with the Roman Empire is misleading: the Huns, Germans and Sarmatians beyond the pale never had the intention of destroying the Empire – they wanted to join it, to become generals and emperors ...”

“... campaign book, dealing with the war against the Italians and the first battles against Rommel, in North Africa, in 1941. Two further volumes about this theatre are promised and the full set will undoubtedly provide the definitive study. Mr Pitt clearly knows his material and the narrative deftly weaves together the various strands of his story: the political ...”

“... had given way to carbombs. While Heaney in County Wicklow wrote the poems that would go into North, common ground was eroded. Moderates still hoped for power-sharing, but the prospects for compromise were damaged in February 1973, when the Loyalist Association of Workers called a general strike – flexing the industrial muscle which would later destroy ...”

“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... the lands surrounding the monastery as they made their escape (Debre Libanos is sixty miles or so north of the city). The plan – which survives in the archives of the Italian administration – was to kill the entire religious community there. Graziani’s subordinate General Maletti was chosen to carry out the massacre, commanding a Muslim battalion made ...”

“... but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993) isn’t a bad shot. I’m struck by the fact that the most powerful contribution made by an English historian to Jesuit history, Outram Evennett’s Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (1968) was written by a person who ...”

“... belongs to our God” ’. These events usher in the new heaven and earth foreseen by St John where righteousness reigns and death is no more. The present inheritors of this apocalyptic strain in Christendom, evangelical missionaries attached to Protestant Churches in the United States, are engaged, therefore, in an urgent mission to reach the last ...”

“... at the time of the 2015 election. This is the outcome which has been argued for by the Tory MP John Stevenson, who is Scottish, but represents a constituency in the north of England. ‘You can’t have a situation where the government of the United Kingdom is determined by the representation from Scotland, which could ...”

“... subtle: after all, who could possibly object to a forum open to all democratic political parties, North and South? It may appeal to people in Britain who would like to see Northern Ireland off their hands in the shortest possible space of time, and without bloodshed. It has delighted the SDLP, whose very raison d’être has been vanishing, since the Assembly ...”

“... lying together gets very complicated, especially as just a few pages ago Charsky was scaling the North Face of the Eiger. Summit (1987) was the fourth work in the sequence. This ‘mind-bogglingly miscalculated’ novel (as a typical reviewer called it) was set in Geneva against a meeting between the Russian premier Grobichev (sic) and President O’Reilly ...”

“... from Japan to Uzbekistan. In 2004, South Korean manufacturers began to set up factories in the North Korean city of Kaesong, an unprecedented experiment in co-operation between the fraternal enemies, and the core of what the South Korean government called its Sunshine Policy. Along with South Korean managers, manufacturing technology, telephone lines and a ...”

“... In 1964, Time published a profile of John Cheever which, in a sub-heading, described him as ‘The Monogamist’. Subsequent events have proved that not to have been the fact-checkers’ finest hour. In 1984, two years after his death, Susan Cheever published Home before Dark, a memoir which portrayed her father, whose public image was that of an impeccably upper-middle-class monogamist suburban WASP, as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic ...”

“... of romantic instinct and distinctly traditionalist prose, based on a small seaside village in North Wales.’ But in 1974, we learn, her stone was rolled away and she found herself resurrected by ‘the most thrilling phenomenon of contemporary American journalism’, an enterprise ‘which had established its fortunes upon the economics of rock ...”