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“... tire, never get sick, never threaten each other. And they never say why.) Kötting did the hard miles with his grandmother, Gladys Morris (a voice), and his daughter Eden (a presence). His expedition begins on the pebbles alongside the De La Warr Pavilion. I walked with Kötting to view the pyramidical tomb of James Burton, founding speculator of St ...”

“... Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... all self-help, to make people smile by first making them cry. Celebrity Fit Club is not a million miles away, together with DIY shows and cookery programmes that provoke people into thinking their life’s troubles can be vanished away with an apt deployment of cushions and fresh coriander. Nobody doubts it; everybody’s buying.2 This thinking has now been ...”

“... that he was being sent on a real mission instead, and that he was to fly to a point thirty miles west. When Fravor arrived at the location he saw an object ‘about the size of a 737’ – so nearly 140 feet long – beneath the surface of the sea. Above it was a wingless, fifty-foot-long UFO shaped like a ‘tic-tac’, which flew in erratic patterns ...”

“... But there were only so many options for a single-crop economy of seven million people ninety miles from the Florida coast. After Kennedy, in April 1961, signed off on the coup Eisenhower had planned, and incompetently executed it, nothing was going to repair relations (in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mailer proposed easing relations by ...”

“... that was neither strictly moral nor strictly bourgeois. John Gilliam drove his horse and cart six miles from Portisham to the Golden Grape wreck ‘with intent to buy some of the goods that were salved out of the said ship for his money’. As pay for carting cargo he was given a barrel of raisins, which he managed to sell for 35 shillings. Alice Mathews did ...”

“... of many islets’, marked by local specialisms. Birmingham was strong in industrial sociology, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall had pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international ...”

“... inside offer views over the Pennines, Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of industrial, rather than post-industrial, satellites, which do not accord with the RGS’s ‘Discovering Britain’, an embarrassing programme of ‘Marmite landscapes’ and ‘tiny treasure hunts’. There are yet further views, equally outside the RGS ...”

“... from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the Salieri Express for Budapest, then chuffs on to Milan, from where it cruises to a luxurious island on Lake Como, then to Lausanne. A brief interlude on Lake Geneva is ...”

“... restaurant, and there order for both of them all the rich food he had travelled several hundred miles to hear himself forbidden. In two other respects, he tried somewhat harder to follow his doctor’s orders. Every summer he started a cure at Marienbad, or Carlsbad, or Pau, though he invariably broke it off after a week, and spent the rest of his holiday ...”

“... work shifts in a huddle of prefabs, rotating in from Smithton, the nearest small settlement, sixty miles away by bush road. High over their heads a mast topped by air-sampling instruments soars another two hundred feet. Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station is one of an international chain, all in out-of-the-way places, far from human habitation – Barrow ...”

“... President enquired how much time he had before his next appointment. Enough, it seemed. There are miles of such security tapes generated every day in Federal Government buildings. To have been kept for five years and located immediately, this particular extract must have been clipboarded as a matter of clandestine ribaldry by White House underlings (‘Some ...”

“... nature as it is of his writing, and the man who wrote in 1792 that he had ‘not journey’d 20 miles from home these 20 years’ was in agonies at the prospect of going into society because he feared he might not behave as he should. ‘I would have given the world to have been excused, sensible that I was unfit for company, and fearing lest I should ...”

“... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the instructions of our ...”