“... to François Truffaut in the summer of 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the ...”

“... on their noses. I didn’t choose Wimbledon because of any local connection (I grew up in North London) but because I had seen them on TV in the mid-1970s, where they featured as non-league FA Cup giant-killers, or at least giant-stunners, holding the mighty Leeds United to a goalless draw before losing 1-0 in the replay. When Wimbledon were invited ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... to the ‘Field Day’ standpoint has already been mooted in the essay on Seamus Heaney’s North: she dislikes the practice of equating one set of circumstances with another, without sufficiently allowing for the differences between the two. Hence, she says, Heaney’s Iron Age Danish excavations yield up material so alien to contemporary Ireland that ...”

“... leader. The chief military task of Möngke’s reign was the conquest of southern China: the north had fallen increasingly under the domination of peoples from beyond China’s frontiers in the centuries prior to the rise of the Mongols, and its absorption into the new empire had been relatively rapid. But the Southern Sung dynasty, which held the ...”

“... vital to them than it really is. We all know from Fenimore Cooper’s novels of salt-licks in the North American forests that deer would journey hundreds of miles to reach. Such animals appear, as Dr Adshead says, to have an organic need of a certain quantity of salt which they are not tempted to exceed, whereas human beings, requiring a yearly intake of ...”

“... in Rwanda-Burundi or Bosnia, or out of colonial conquest, as in Chechnya or, in the 19th century, North America, Australia or parts of Africa. The tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, though each probably caused more deaths than the Third Reich, did not aim at the total physical extermination of entire populations. The same can be said of the deportation and deaths ...”

“... are no closer to his material objects than Thomas Hardy’s, for all that the former came from the North-East and the latter from the South-West. The relationship between language and the world is not a spatial one, any more than the relation between a spade and the act of digging with it. The celebrated ‘materiality’ of a poet like Heaney is really a ...”

“... Londoner, herself. When I cross the river, the sword that divides me from pleasure and money, I go North. That is, I take the Northern Line ‘up West’, as we say: that is, to the West End. My London consists of all the stations on the Northern Line, but don’t think I scare easily: I have known the free and easy slap-and-tickle of Soho since ...”

“... reform of the civil service, and massive R&D spending in place of simply funnelling money up north – was far too much for Johnson, who was terrified it might make him unpopular. That left a vacuum where serious policy might be. Soon enough the empty space was filled by scandal, with Cummings helpfully unstoppering the bottle.What was left? After the ...”

“... bamboos of China’s western forests. They dominate the natural landscape in the prairies of North America, the steppes of Central Asia, the savannahs of Africa and South America; in total they cover about a quarter of the world’s land surface, and probably account for a disproportionate 10 per cent of the biomass of land-dwelling plants. Wherever ...”

“... themselves to the United States. This time the great majority came not from the British Isles or North-West Europe, but from the valleys of the Vistula and the Danube and the slopes of the Carpathians and the Apennines. Of the more than one million immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1907 more than 80 per cent were so-called ‘new ...”

“... notion for cartographers and their historians. Sometimes it means plain old accuracy: there is no North-West Passage emanating from Hudson Bay; there are continents beyond the Mediterranean ‘oecumene’ – the ‘inhabited world’. Only ignorance and deliberate falsehood sin against this standard of objectivity. When scientific cartographers worry about ...”

“... but Middlesbrough has the highest rates of sexual crime and violence against the person in the North-East. It’s almost as bad as Hackney, where I live. Middlesbrough hasn’t weathered the recession well. In a recent study of local authorities’ ability to cope with the coming cuts, Middlesbrough turned out to be the most vulnerable place in the ...”