“... individual scholar but to a madrasa established in 1866 in the town of Deoband, an hour’s drive north of Delhi, and now one of the world’s most influential seats of Islamic learning. The version of Islam it teaches is in many ways similar to Wahhabism – both movements are Sunni, puritanical and highly intolerant of people who disagree with them – but ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast in their constituencies, 44 (including Tony Blair and John Prescott) were elected with over 70 per cent, and two with over 80 per cent. By contrast, only 14 Conservatives won more than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The most successful Conservative, John Major in ...”

“... done that after all. Instead she gave a tasty story about gun-running between the South and North of Ireland. By the afternoon a commander (Huntly) and a chief superintendent (Nevill) were up from London again to ask her about a bomb at Euston Station in September 1973. Oh, she said, she hadn’t planted that, but she had delivered the bombs for ...”

“... Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old folk’s fatal gobs Coughed up in grates North or North East ‘Tween bouts o’ livin dialect, It should be time to hymn your own wreck, Your house the source of ancient song ... Like Edwin Morgan, Dabydeen is a poet-academic whose careers are interlinked and who ...”

“... in 1949; it’s the sound of William Burroughs waiting out a blizzard in a depot fifty miles north of Wichita. ‘Yes, that’s ol’ Junkie Bill, over by the stove there, just whittlin’ on his penis,’ says the station master, while Bill mumbles to himself:The buyer has a steady connection: the man within, you might say, or so he thinks. I’ll just ...”

“... the future that didn’t include him’): but this return for Thomas’s influential promotion of North of Boston lapsed after the latter’s death. The separation of Thomas and Frost along an Anglo-American dotted line distorts perspectives on early 20th-century poetry. A history so specific to poetry has been additionally marginalised by the Modernist ...”

“... in 1603: Scotland perhaps illustrates the proposition that there was such a thing as a ‘North Sea economy’. At a time when waterborne trade was so conspicuously easier than land-borne trade, this is probably what should have been expected. The thought prompts the reflection that the improvements in road transport characteristic of the 17th century ...”

“... the talent of Keith Richard), his preoccupation with the Travelling Man (the narrator is driving north to Canada, and later seems to cover most of the freeways of America), and his superstitious belief in the interventions of Fate (the driver hits a black raven, killing it, and then follows the voice of the raven’s feather instructing him to deliver it to ...”

“... Hull and Gertrude Atherton. She is wasting a lot of her time and too much of ours trying to be John O’Hara. At the slightest surge of congested blood between her primly pressed together thighs, all Mrs Krantz’s carefully garnered social detail gives way to eyes like twin dark stars, mouths like moist fruit and breasts quivering with indignation. There ...”

“... to wonder if Eveline – poor, romantic Eveline – opts for ‘some domestic form of Home Rule in North Richmond Street’, or ‘alternatively’, if she can be termed ‘an abstensionist’, he is being either fatuous or facetious. The book covers roughly the same ground as ‘ “The Protestant Strain” ’ (playfully subtitled ‘A Short History of ...”

“... I was taken by some Israeli friends, peace-loving and generous in their attitudes, to the far north and shown the hole in the barbed wire, known as the Friendly Gate, through which, I was told with pride, Israeli doctors passed daily to work in poor Arab villages. It was at least a start, they said to me. But, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with ...”

“... pack up and go home. She will like the illustrated edition of Priestley’s English Journey. John Hadfield, the picture editor, has found photographs – some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with ...”

“... President of the United States.’ His popularity in the country, especially among Labour people north of the Trent, held up remarkably throughout much political misfortune and extended into his retirement. This was something which metropolitan comment tended to ignore. Wilson was an incorrigibly provincial man with the common touch, and that, I ...”

“... The brevity of the visit inevitably led to mistakes. He has the famous policeman/runner John Akii-Bua returning from exile to greet the liberators, when he was in fact returning from Kenya (where he had been briefly held in the Kakamega camp for Amin’s men fleeing the liberators) after a running engagement in West Germany. He never defected. Mr ...”