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“... the European consciousness after the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and the port of Assab, about 1500 miles down the coast, was sold by the presiding sultan to an Italian priest. After the Berlin conference, the Italians landed a force at another port, Massawa, and pushed 25 miles inland, where it was wiped out in 1887 by an ...”

“... or so away. In October 1917, after the Italians were routed at the Battle of Caporetto, a hundred miles north-west, the Austrians advanced and occupied Tezze for a year until the tide turned at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. A combined force of Italian troops and the British 7th Division then crossed the Piave and recaptured the town. Thousands died in the ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and streamlining and, in the north, in ...”

“... controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy place, seize ...”

“... to secure the necessary permit to hire horses in the city. The murderers covered nearly twenty miles on foot before collapsing, exhausted, at an inn where the posse caught up with them. When the bewildered Guido asked how they knew who to look for and where to find him, and was told that his wife was still living, he fainted. (It later emerged that his ...”

“... convinced that Blacks lacked the capacity for aerial warfare, at first kept them hundreds of miles from the battle zone. But the Airmen went on to play a key role in the Battle of Anzio, shooting down a dozen enemy planes. In the last two years of the war, some Black soldiers were able to take part in ground combat, including D-Day and the Battle of the ...”

“... most of the downs to the north of Pitton. In the 1920s the villagers were aware of them as miles of dereliction, just over the horizon. It was possible to see the outlines of the deserted fields and even of the plough ridges, for they had been abandoned without even being sown to grass. On some the dominant vegetation was not even weeds but brown and ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes people think in the wrong ...”

“... while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester Bangs. One of the founding members of the anarchist outfit Crass changed his name by deed poll in 1977 to Penny Rimbaud. Here were the Fall, and the Cure’s ‘Killing an Arab’. Nurse with Wound quoted ...”

“... to major doses of radiation. The disasters occurred at the top-secret Mayak complex, located fifty miles north of Chelyabinsk. Covering 200 square kilometres, Mayak was the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear weapons factory for over forty years. It has been called ‘the most polluted spot on earth’, a judgment not disputed by the Mayak official I interviewed ...”

“... Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with oakum. The table surface was a finely-shaved sheet of freshwater ice; the balls were hand-carved from ...”

“... children, imprisonment – or pressure to inform on others. Since unification these files, 111 miles of them, have been administered by a body popularly known as the ‘Gauck authority’ after the former East German pastor who directs it. By June 1996, it had fielded over a million applications from individuals seeking to inspect their own files. The ...”

“... is capable of drawing a line from, say, the Warburgian theorising of the retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes to the biopolitics of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral ...”