“... Liddesdale came close to that state. It was in touch with flourishing literary cultures to the north and south. One Warden of the English East March, Lord Hunsdon, a fierce and effective commander, a hanger and a swearer, and a patron of actors, was destined to be in touch with Shakespeare: reputedly the son of Henry VIII, he was also, I notice, the keeper ...”

“... it lies in conscience about poverty – social conscience reinforced by patrician prudence. Paul Barker’s collection of essays shows how eclectic were the founders of the Welfare State. It is scarcely worth disputing the paternity claims between the Asquith government of 1905-1914 and the Attlee government of 1945-1951. War and coalition were also its ...”

“... Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ...”

“... against the forces of the Crown, but in the atavistic struggles which had long characterised the north-east. From 1921, when the Anglo-Irish Treaty created the Free State and left the North as a more or less autonomous province within the Union, historians are faced with a conundrum: to treat Ireland as two separate ...”

“... North beyond Sarajevo is where the hills of Bosnia become less grey and gaunt than they are elsewhere, and a little further north again they slope away to the plain of Semberija along the Sava River. It is a pleasant enough country in normal times although a hungry one, with its peasants inhabiting scattered hamlets and family homesteads ...”

“... Press has been publishing Burke’s writings and speeches under the overall editorship of Paul Langford, the first systematically new edition since that compiled between 1792 and 1827. No one reading these genuinely engrossing volumes can doubt the calibre of Burke’s mind, the power of his language, or the enduring pungency of his political ...”

“... It will mean respect for indigenous rights and a huge transfer of wealth and technology from north to south. All on a global scale, and within a decade – or two at most. This is an American liberal wishlist, and a fantastical one. ‘Climate change can be a People’s Shock, a blow from below,’ Klein writes. ‘It can disperse power into the hands of ...”

“... and ‘Poor’, while Part Two consists of a prose meditation on Raine’s childhood in the North of England, as if ‘91, Revere Street’ formed a junction with ‘Terry Street’: ‘A Silver Plate’ is, to say the least, helpful to a reading of poems in Rich (‘The Season in Scarborough 1923’, ‘A Hungry Fighter’) and to autobiographical ...”

“... I asked him if he would give away the prizes and draw the raffle at an Anti-Nazi League fête in North London. He was keen to do so, spent the whole afternoon at the fête, joined in the six-a-side football (he was terrifyingly furious with me for missing a penalty) and when I thanked him, he said he should be thanking me. ‘It’s not often I do something ...”

“... been burning, or who or what sparked the blaze. When I asked the then chairman of Ryton Golf Club, Paul Whittaker, how the fire under the course started, he could only tell me when they first became aware of it. Fires underground can be started by spontaneous combustion, if the right elements are present: the mineral pyrite, when combined with oxygen, produces ...”

“... is left unsure about whether the author has really consulted his source or why. For example, Paul Valéry died in 1945 at the age of 74. He had been elected a member of the Académie Française in 1925 and is primarily renowned as a poet. But Tainter brands him as the ‘noted French social philosopher’, with the suggestion that he was still alive in ...”

“... for a united Ireland and the defence of the civil rights of the minority population in the North. The blurring of the all-important demarcation line between these two issues has been a hallmark of IRA strategy, which consistently depicts its Armalite-laden cadres as ‘defenders’ of the Catholic population of the ...”

“... responding to a senator’s aide who is sure the agency has sent an innocent man off to an unnamed North African country for questioning. Or for pointless violence and humiliation, since nobody really believes he knows anything. This is a decent liberal movie caught up itself in the double-think of the War on Terror. I’m sure the writer and director of ...”

“... transaction with the outside world, regularly intercepting letters. Paranoia was the family ethos. Paul’s sensibility did not earn high marks from his father. Its earliest manifestations were greeted with derision and he relied for emotional support almost entirely on his vivacious mother, Elisabeth. ‘A quiet and docile student, he worked hard; he had a ...”

“... hawk with an indifferent eye, on the 46 bus.The homesick and untethered South African exiles in North London – among them Dan Jacobson – gathered to meet the chic and tiny Nadine Gordimer, just in from Johannesburg, and to sample the trays of vol-au-vents and finger-friendly desserts, iced fancies and decorated chocs. Iris ...”