“... 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 ...”

“... their theological lineage back to a madrasa established in the town of Deoband, a hundred miles north of Delhi, in 1867. This madrasa brought together many Muslims who were not only hostile to British rule but committed to a literalist interpretation of Islam. The scholars in Deoband argued that the Quran and Sunnah (the words and deeds of the Prophet), as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... taken monthly from one August to the next at Rudha Cailleach, or Witches’ Point, on the north shore of Loch Maree, you find you’re watching a mobile image, pregnant in each of its 13 stages, the more so because it alters so much as the winds and currents urge and reposition the four types of stone that compose the spit. Now it resembles the tail ...”

“... and shot their British officers; other mutinies quickly followed across the Bengal army camps of north and central India. Thanks in part to newly laid telegraph lines, the company was able to prevent mutiny from spreading in the Punjab and elsewhere; the Madras and Bombay armies also remained ‘loyal’. But it was not able to prevent the mutineers from ...”

“... to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For ...”

“... that out there in the tropical rain-forests man could retrace his steps and begin again. In the North, such utopian communities were private ventures: and they proliferated – Oneida, New Harmony, Equality, True Inspiration. There was even one called Utopia. ‘We are all a little wild here,’ Emerson wrote to Carlyle in 1840, ‘with numberless projects ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”