“... and emphasis. The delivery was crafted to move like natural speech, with a leavening of slow-burn humour. This was a country-smart poetry, beautifully balanced between frontier transcendentalism and the long gaze of Asia. A week on the road is enough to confirm my instinct that this western strip, all the way down from Canada to Mexico, with its climatic ...”

“... above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it, and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious smell, a capacity to cause conflagrations, and a deadly impact. Nature kindly put a huge amount of the earth’s carbon underground, and we have for the past 200 years been putting it ...”

“... and sometimes by strenuous physical effects on Kelley: ‘he thought verily that his bowels did burn.’ ‘His body had a fiery heat, even from his breast down unto all his parts, his privities and thighs.’ ‘He started, and said he felt a thing creeping within his head, and in that pang became all in a sweat; and he remained much misliking the moving ...”

“... explosive payloads – at home. ‘Do you want to build an FPV drone with your own hands that will burn a Russian tank?’ the project website asks. ‘Then this opportunity is for you!’Government enthusiasm for a cottage kamikaze drone industry (the foundation, it should be noted, doesn’t ask amateur constructors to add the explosives themselves in their ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... the Dome is showbiz. Old showbiz, resting showbiz, between projects showbiz: David Puttnam, Michael Grade and sparky Floella Benjamin. Disney World on message. The critics have been taken care of with nicely weighted sweetheart deals. The Mail, along with the London Evening Standard, which had combined its anti-Jeffrey Archer campaign with a series of ...”

“... meet their deadlines in the phased demilitarisation set out in Thaci’s undertaking. General Sir Michael Jackson, the KFOR commander, to whom the undertaking was given, has said in effect that full disarmament is a pipe-dream, but he’s confident that some sort of demilitarisation schedule will be completed and he’s prepared to stretch a date or two on ...”

“... Perhaps for that reason their stories about time spent with Tom and Viv – the title of Michael Hastings’s uninspired play, first performed in 1984 and then made into a movie – have proved in some instances to be irresistibly quotable. In the end, however, very little of consequence is in fact disclosed about the Eliots or the marriage, only ...”

“... to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political victories, and the state later used much of its ‘land ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”

“... of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the stores, even if you found you’d got the wrong bits, you couldn’t sign them back in. The system didn’t allow that. There ...”

“... was Ion Antonescu, a career general who forced the king to abdicate in favour of 18-year-old Michael on the evening of 5 September 1940. The coup granted Carol Hohenzollern the distinction of being the only European sovereign to lose his throne twice to his son. ‘King Carol Goes Again’ was the headline in the Times.He left on a train before dawn the ...”

“... left Romania for exile in Paris. As a result, when King Ferdinand died two years later, it was Michael, Carol’s five-year-old son by Princess Helen, who was crowned under a regency. Three years later, the boy king was unseated in a quiet coup by his father, who flew into Bucharest under cover of night (Lupescu followed later). Carol had chosen his moment ...”

“... and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the evening service, Charlotte Brontë did something strange and entirely uncharacteristic: she followed the worshippers in.’Charlotte wrote to Emily of that ...”