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“... at al-Hilla is instructive. Al-Hilla is a city of just over half a million people, about fifty miles south of Baghdad. Many of its residents are poor, living with their families and animals in areas of tightly packed mud-brick houses and dirt streets. On the morning of 31 March last year, the neighbourhood of Nadir, about half a mile south of the city’s ...”

“... iambic pentameter stiffens a pleasant holiday conceit and gives it seriousness and point:Ten miles above the tits at St TropezA satellite’s remote, panoptic eyeIs tracking us and quietly waiting forThe gesture that could culminate in war;You scratch your nose, I finish my ice-creamAnd screw the silver paper in the sand.Your milky skin is tanning like a ...”

“... in W.V. Brelsford’s account, his horse died in such a remote place that he had to cycle 860 miles in a week, armed with ‘merely a bottle of Bovril, some bars of chocolate and his razors. No one ever saw him unshaven.’ (Hostility to beards was a Grey trait through the generations.) The contrast is striking. Perhaps Grey’s greatest skill was in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it.’ Jonathan Coe drops in to tell Maxwell Sim that his book is about to end; Sim looks ‘into the eyes of a serial killer’, and suspects that ‘beneath his courteous exterior, this guy was full of nothing but conceit and self-admiration.’ In At Swim-Two-Birds ...”

“... 1884, and both volumes of the Deer Forest Commission, 1892) to Dave’s car. Oban by 2.15, 53 miles of Highland road in an hour and a quarter? By half-past two we are safely stowed aboard the ferry and gliding north-westward across the blue glaze of the sound between Morvern and Mull. 12 May. We spend the day reconnoitring the south-west corner of South ...”

“... Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television ...”

“... these ventures to succeed. No Farinelli or Senesino, no Cuzzoni or Faustina, have ever been within miles of the financial range of our revivalists. With singers well-known on our amateur choral circuit, Lewis and Farncombe have consistently shown us the glory of Handel’s devotion to the theatre. This allows Jonathan Keates ...”

“... half of the eligible members of German princely families joined the party. As the American scholar Jonathan Petropoulos observed in his study of the princes of Hessen, if princes had constituted a profession, ‘they would have rivalled physicians as the most Nazified in the Third Reich (doctors’ membership peaked in 1937 at 43 per ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since Martin’s, Bate’s should finally disprove Dickens’s dismissal of it as a ‘preposterous exaggeration ...”

“... sailed for the New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near Dorchester, but subsequently moved and became the leading citizen of the newly founded town of Roxbury, between Dorchester and Boston. He served as treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Company and traded directly with the Native ...”

“... this review. ‘Out of the ashes of this Götterdämmerung,’ wrote the scourge of the poppies, Jonathan Jones, of his own exit from the exhibition, ‘I crawled away exhausted, wrecked, into the empty light of the modern world.’ Wow. That is some reaction. After all that mundane examining, admiring, taking notes, I was a touch exhausted myself, but ...”

“... reason: he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only ...”

“... of course, in real-world terms, in dollars); players, for instance, could be docked real air miles for random killings. But the logic of BigIf ensures its survival: The crisis peaked and passed. Superwarlords got bigger on more killing. A few became megasuperwarlords, but one after another, each of them was swallowed up by his or her own retinue, which ...”

“... factory worker from Nottingham describing a long bicycle ride through the Midlands, 250 miles, stopping at a Youth Hostel and a bed-and-breakfast place for building workers. This took place in 1945, during the General Election with its surprising and exciting Labour victory, but the story is as fresh as if the boy had written it yesterday. The ...”