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“... Piers Paul Read’s Free Frenchman is Bertrand de Roujay, whose most significant act is to repudiate Pétain and his expedient administration at Vichy, and take himself to London, clandestinely, where he throws in his lot with the more honourable and recalcitrant de Gaulle. The year in which these events take place is 1940, and we’re nearly half-way through the novel when this climactic moment arrives ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... newspaper that everyone needed to have a hobby. The Labour prospective parliamentary candidate, Paul Harvey, called for a by-election; he was ignored. By the time of his defection to the DUP, the Tories should have got used to being embarrassed by Hunter’s opinions. Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership campaign was temporarily hobbled by the Basingstoke ...”

“... power of her early books, particularly Union Street, set in the working-class communities of the North-East in the 1970s. The true answer, I think, may be more uncanny. Barker’s writing has gravitated to war because there’s something wild and unstable in her idiosyncratic vision. In wartime, those social and moral and imaginative securities which might ...”

“... separated physically and socially from the more numerous Sri Lankan Tamils concentrated in the north and east of the country. The precise origins of this latter group, which comprises one-eighth of the population, are heatedly and irrelevantly discussed by both Sinhalese and Tamil historians, but it is clear that Tamils have been in the country for at ...”

“... in itself, but as a symptom and symbol of the ultimate deprivations of a slave’s life. When Paul D, an ex-slave, is shown an old newspaper cutting with a drawing of a black woman he tries not to recognise, he is whipped by fear, ‘because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted ...”

“... a misery. Only last week (23 November) I read Graham Allen, the new Labour member for Nottingham North, growing greatly indignant over pit closures in Notts. He was answered by Cecil Parkinson at his oily best. ‘The Hon. Gentleman talks as if only Conservative governments have presided over pit closures, but 70 per cent of all pit closures have taken place ...”

“... homogenised into a collective “they”.’ This process goes on, even without the assistance of North American academics, under the more familiar name of ‘stereotyping’. But the use of the term ‘othering’ adds the rich implication that the more ‘knowable’ (that is, the more stereotyped) the object becomes, the more inscrutable ...”

“... Derek Bromhall), there is no firm evidence. I have watched them for nearly sixty years, at home in North-East Scotland and Westmorland, in the Dolomites and on Gibraltar, and from high up on the Blouberg in Transvaal, and their closest intimacy was the click of their beaks when they raced towards each other and kissed momentarily in midair. Fiennes’s ...”

“... be appropriated and used to refer to the ‘whole terrain of science parks and autoroutes’. Paul Sinclair, the novel’s narrator, is a pilot and aviation enthusiast who is recuperating from a plane crash. He arrives at the business park with Jane, the much younger wife he met and married while being treated for his injuries. Jane has taken a medical ...”

“... but what an effect it has all had on the people! What warmth – what courage! … People in the North singing in the public shelters … WVS girls serving hot drinks to firefighters … Everybody absolutely determined: secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler. Not that Jennings had lost his sense of self-importance. He was a deliberately ...”

“... in Havana); his predecessor, Pat Rabbitte; several prominent trade unionists; the historian Paul (now Lord) Bew; and many writers and journalists, including Ronan Bennett and sometime Ireland correspondents of the Guardian and the Sunday Times. It would be hard to spend even a day in Ireland reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching ...”

“... conservatives as well as liberals at the end of Reagan’s expensive two terms in the White House, Paul Kennedy suggested that like other great powers before it, the United States was dissipating the resources that had made it great. It was in ‘imperial overstretch’. And its political system, like that of Britain earlier in the century, would make the ...”

“... objected to the breadth of his canvas. Give us back the tidy Reformation we used to know about, Paul Johnson complained, something which began in 1517 and ended with the Council of Trent in 1563. This misses the point by several miles. Only by taking the story far into the 17th century can MacCulloch plot the line and plumb the depth of the greatest ...”

“... gay community-worker, Stephen, whose job has brought him back to home territory in the industrial North-East (one of his duties is to persuade Liza to vacate her condemned home), are the matter of the other half. The relationship between Liza and Stephen grows deep – their dependence on each other becomes symbolic of tolerance, rationality and hope. The ...”