Sorting out the loop when using the page “more” function

The “more” and “next page” tags work as expected when a site is set up such that the blog is the front end [home] of the site.

However when the site is set up such that a static page is home and the blog appears elsewhere on the site then these two tags will fail when used in static pages. The links for “More” or “Page N N” appear at the foot of the relevant page, but clicking on the links returns an error “Post not found” with a search box.
Clearly, the URL which the more or next page links are pointing to cannot be found, and changing the permalink structure in various ways makes absolutely no difference to the result: the link is still not found.

This failure happens when using either Classic or Default themes, as well as with various custom themes, so I conclude that it isn’t simply a matter of how a theme is constructed; there has to be a more fundamental flaw somewhere which so far I’ve failed to discover or understand.

Various people have reported similar things in several places over the last few months; various suggestions for code changes have been made. As far as I can tell none of these suggestions work and the issue remains unresolved.

I’ve done a fair bit of reading here and elsewhere about how the loop works and I’m probably more confused now than when I started.

Could somebody please explain how changing a site from blog as front end to static page as front end will so affect the loop that these two page markup tags break in this way.

Many thanks,

Robert