“... of the bitter trials and struggles of the poor, of the grim divisions widening between the North and the South. These novels deeply impressed her contemporaries; but like all extrovert reportage they lose with time the power to be much more than scenic diagram and description. A telling detail thrown off in Dickens, the facts suggested or taken for ...”

“... and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose contents were the same from Bismarck, North Dakota to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In these glistening malls, Waldenbooks or B. Dalton had to pay the same high rents as the shops next door, Florsheim’s Shoes or Miller’s Outpost. This meant high volume, fast turnover. The chains aren’t interested in ...”

“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... Others, such as Nelson Algren (the director of its Illinois branch), Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, had already begun to make their reputations. Studs Terkel would find his calling when the FWP sent him out onto the streets of Chicago to collect oral history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale ...”

“... of such nationalists: but it is the occasional gringo heretic – like the muckraking journalist John Kenneth Turner who, in 1909, blew the whistle on Mexican neo-slavery, alleging that his compatriots had ‘transformed Mexico into a slave colony of the US’ – who has often made the biggest impact. Such auto-critiques carry special weight; they exude ...”

“... done were to make the first ever solo Atlantic crossing in a balloon, and to get shot down by the North Vietnamese in 1972, leading to an 11-month stay in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’. At the moment he is working with Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian high-altitude specialist whose Red Bull Stratos project has the goal of free-falling from a balloon at 120,000 ...”

“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”

“... They’ll never pull it off, people said. Too little time, too little money, obstruction from the North … The April 2010 elections – both presidential and local – had gone poorly, ‘highly chaotic, non-transparent, and vulnerable to electoral manipulation’, as the international observers from the Carter Center declared ...”

“... remaking ourselves, the world over, in the image of US capitalism, because the only alternative is North Korean autarchy? Clearly he isn’t always wrong, though much of what he says in the course of this enlightening and infuriating book can and should be contested. It is best read in conjunction with Global Transformations, which is as dry as The Lexus and ...”

“... prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to advise President Johnson against extending the war into the North. Following his election victory in October that year, Wilson was advised by the Foreign Office that, with regard to Vietnam, ‘ministers should agree to support the United States in this limited and controlled form of offensive action.’ He appears to ...”

“... Minister. Through his mother, an Ulster Presbyterian by origin, he also acquired contacts in the North quite unusual among Dublin politicians. To the experience of growing up in a distinguished political and literary family, he could add his own experience as an administrator and an academic. He went into politics committed to the building of a just society ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we took the leis from ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”

“... but had agreed to go to Scotland in August with Sarianna his sister and Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old ...”

“... footage showing Britain from space. Cut again to another drone shot, heading inland from the North Sea this time, as far from Old Harry Rocks as you can get in the British Isles, towards Muckle Flugga lighthouse in the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, to watch a pod of orca hunting for seals.The narrative rhythms of such sequences are by now firmly ...”