“... her speeches were greeted with jeers and she was called a ‘stupid cow’ by Tony Marlow, one of John Major’s Maastricht rebels (there’s a video of this on YouTube: Marlow looks very pleased with himself, especially when he manages to repeat the remark after the Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, asks him whether he’d used ‘unparliamentary language’). When ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river is a constant in history and the river is history, of a persuasion that reminds me of childhood favourites such as Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and glossed as ‘A ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... hemisphere), with hard-to-quantify consequences like the disruption, or even disappearance, of the North Atlantic Carrier which brings Caribbean warmth via the Gulf Stream, and its cold counter-current returning from Norway with spawning eels. There are, on the face of it, three alternatives: the exhaustion of fossil fuel (14 million years’ accumulation of ...”

“... to do with it, probably, escape always attractive to my mother, particularly an escape from the North – or the dark, satanic mills aspect of it anyway.It is this, I think, that makes her very occasionally urge on me the attractions of the writer’s life, instancing the novels of Leo Walmsley or Naomi Jacob – even, going up the scale a bit, the Brontë ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... him. They ‘utilised the social, economic and religious grievances to be found in the disaffected North, grievances linked not to feudal or popular uproar, but to the increasing distrust felt by the regional gentry towards a threatening and revolutionary court policy’. Ideology was as unimportant as it always has been for Elton. And he leaves us with the ...”

“... or rather a proof that paradise exists and can be abandoned. Goethe is happy with the sterner North, or says he is. ‘The Duchess is well and contented,’ he writes of his employer’s mother’s homecoming from her Italian trip, ‘as one is when one returns from paradise. I am now used to it, and this time I was quite happy to leave Italy.’ Used to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the assessments that claimants had to undergo in order to receive disability benefits. As John Pring shows in The Department, these changes – and others that followed – would ‘lead to countless deaths of disabled people’.Many governments have talked up the number and significance of false claims. A decade before the Blenheim conference, Peter ...”

“... by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going. Written around 1954, the poem got wide notice after ...”

“... could only survive by remaining in the shadows. Isis, by contrast, has been able to move through north-east Syria and large parts of northern Iraq with almost complete freedom. There has always been a strand of Islam with global aspirations rising above national frontiers: the Islamic State now aims to put those ideas into practice. One of the caliph’s ...”

“... here, far from softening it, themselves took on the ruthless quality of the local nature. (John Berryman’s father shot himself in Clearwater, Florida, in 1926, after some failed land speculation.) Eventually, made safe – though never altogether – for year-round habitation by the twin miracles of air-conditioning and refrigeration. Florida still ...”