By a curious chance of history the islands at both the northern and southern ends of the eight-thousand-mile long Mid-Atlantic Ridge are possessions of the Kingdom of Norway. Jan Mayen Island, at 71 degrees N, is distinguished mainly for having a spectacular mountain, the 8,000 foot Beerenberg.  By contrast Bouvet Island, at 54 degrees S,  although volcanic also, has no peak worthy of mention and is so amply covered with ice that Captain Cook derided its original discoverer - wrongly - for merely having found a stray iceberg. No-one lives on Bouvet, though an automatic weather station there chatters its data incessantly. On Jan Mayen as many as 35 people are to be found there in summer,  half that number of hardy souls who endure the bitter northern winter.

Cudjoe Lewis was the last surviving African slave to have been forcibly transported across the Atlantic to America. He was bought in 1860 for just $50  in what was then the West African kingdom of Dahomey - now the Republic of Benin - and brought to the port of Mobile aboard the slave-ship Clotilde. He was freed at the end of the Civil War and elected to remain in Alabama. He died in 1935 in what is now the suburban Mobile neighborhood of Prichard, aged about 94.

Fastnet Rock, off the coast of County Cork, is a lighthouse-capped outcrop that the sentimentally inclined have long referred to as Ireland’s teardrop, since it was invariably the last fragment of the motherland to be glimpsed by emigrants on their way to America, and Ellis Island.