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“... and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall where we were finally allowed a drink. The House of Lords is not, to be sure, the only British institution which reduces unsuspecting observers to a state of giggling incredulity. But for unblushing ...”

“... nuclear warheads. In principle, therefore, the whole nuclear arsenal could fit into one submarine. Richard Garwin, the designer of the first H-bomb, giving evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Defence in 2007, argued that a much smaller class of submarine, carrying missiles with a single warhead, would be more appropriate for the UK’s needs. There are ...”

“... not only Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 ...”

“... park, ‘discovering how hot the hour of siesta can be and hearing the sunflower seeds crackle for miles and miles’. The first two thousand words of ‘The Salutation’ (1932), written that day, create what is perhaps the most vibrant of all her atmospheres. By the late​ 1920s, Warner was a fixture on the literary ...”

“... describe the results of recent excavations in which the authors have been major participants. Richard Leakey is, of course, the son of a famous father and mother. Of his many discoveries perhaps the most important is the skull cautiously named only by its museum number as KNMER 1470. Until recently it was believed to be the oldest known member of the ...”

“... in the desert south of Las Vegas. (‘Boulder, not Hoover,’ I hear him growling.) The geographer Richard Walker and I had been teaching a seminar at Berkeley on ‘consumer society’ and we were ending term with a field trip to Vegas, and wanted Davis to meet us there. He was doubtful, for reasons easily guessed; he only began to soften when he heard that ...”

“... as the red light filters through the foul air rolling towards Riverside and the desert seventy miles east of the Pacific. And when the Santa Ana winds blow the other way and clean out the whole basin there’s nothing warm in the colour tones even then, just an eerie depth of field so clear throughout its focal range that it’s hard to keep an accurate ...”

“... and the vale of Westmorland, I have stroked a badger which our dog had cornered in a crag. Two miles away I have seen a bittern planing down to its nest in the reedbeds of a wide undrained moss and a young osprey resting in a sycamore on its way south from Speyside to winter in Africa. The fact is that, partly by luck and partly by choice, I have managed ...”

“... from the moment it left Anchorage, KAL 007 strayed northwards off its proper path. It was 365 miles off-course when it was shot down: further than any other plane had strayed in the history of civil aviation. Somehow, none of the waypoints were warned of this deviation. Somehow, no one on board noticed. Somehow, before he set off from Anchorage, the ...”

“... but developed its own distinct identity as a province of its empire.’ Virgil would be delighted. Richard Hingley’s book deals with the troublesome process of uncovering Roman Britain. This is difficult territory. He explores how, between 1586 (the date of William Camden’s Britannia) and 1906 (when Francis Haverfield’s lecture on ‘The Romanisation of ...”

“... by Parliament, he said, since 1566. (In fact, Stewart wasn’t quite right: in the 1650s, Sir Richard Onslow levelled an attack on Charles I’s foreign policy, saying he had ‘wrapped himself in his own bristles’ like a hedgehog – but that was only in passing.) The 1566 debate led to the decision to put a tuppence bounty on hedgehogs: farmers ...”

“... and telephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world. But it became clear enough, when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Kaneda’s temple with corpses to ...”

“... shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily reached by sea than by road. They called it Costa ...”

“... region with a long history of decentralisation. Suffolk’s border with Norfolk is roughly ninety miles from London, but the county seems further away from the capital than that. ‘One of the chief attractions of Suffolk, perversely, is that it is not very easily accessible by road,’ Pevsner wrote. ‘The A12 is discouraging.’ On-the-way-to-nowhere is ...”

“... death I depart’, she entrusted the letter to the Hampshire carrier and waited. Seventy miles away, on the morning of 6 November, Robert woke up in the village of Chilton Candover, lying in a frozen field with five thousand other soldiers. Fires the previous night had not only been for warmth but also to celebrate England’s deliverance from ...”