“... closed, Russia was left dependent on Archangel, icebound half the year, and on Vladivostock, 8,000 miles from the battlefront. With the Black Sea closed, her exports dropped by 98 per cent and her imports by 95 per cent. The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the ...”

“... I went a-wooing you shall find so many slashes upon an ash tree at Winter town end, and how many miles I travelled for her sake was 440 and odd.’ The coward in the marriage stakes is William Ashcombe. At the age of 17, he ‘was much importuned to marry my Lady Garrard’s daughter’ – ‘I saw her and no more.’ At 18, he was offered Kate Howard, but ...”

“... of the world’s smartphones were designed in Hertfordshire, at Kings Langley just a few miles from St Albans, by a British company called Imagination Technologies. The firm was galvanised in 1992 by the arrival of an Iranian immigrant, Hossein (now Sir Hossein) Yassaie. Imagination became known for its Pure brand of digital radios, but it was its ...”

“... I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: ‘WE LOVE YOU DICK.’ The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements – his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb ...”

“... father and deeply felt sketches of social and financial precariousness. Sterne’s rich Uncle Richard, with whom he had boarded, had given him a sight of privilege without its possession. His uncle’s son, also Richard, befriended his impecunious cousin and helped fund him through his time at Jesus ...”

“... was Coleridge.’ After spending the day with him, de Quincey walked home over a distance of 40 miles, alone, at night. He met no one on this journey, passing through the silenced tollgates, his mind filled with thoughts of ‘the greatest man that has ever appeared’. Gradually de Quincey entered the Coleridge family circle, and this secured his visit to ...”

“... revival school of Aldo Rossi in Italy – and the New York Five, particularly Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier, with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone ...”

“... dumbfoundingly small. Donatello by way of Brancusi, smoothed simplicity. One hundred sixty-four miles an hour. The Ducati 916 is a nightingale. It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter. Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean. Sudden as a shark. Seidel’s first book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award ...”

“... have been major investigations in Scotland (the Calman Commission of 2007-8) and Wales – the Richard Commission (2002-4), the Holtham Commission (2007-10) and the Silk Commission (2011-14) – into the broader operation of devolution and the funding mechanisms that support it. Anxiety has focused not only on relations between Westminster and the ...”

“... called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts. It has been left to two dedicated gig-goers, Ross Raymond and Johnny McLaughlin, to document for posterity the ...”

“... in as some of the characters of the Great Plains, the vast tract of prairie stretching 2500 miles down the centre of the United States alongside the eastern edge of the Rockies – but Frazier’s real success is to evoke the Great Plains’ unpeopled, unpunctuated desertion. A spooky land of endless straight roads, two-bit cowtowns and the occasional ...”

“... with a crop of plantains. The palm-trees look scorched, withered, unlike the glossy ones a few miles north of South Central in Inglewood. A red van looms stockily in the rear view as I’m passing brakeshops and tyreshops and a place where they recycle aluminium cans. There are two figures in the van I can’t make out any more because the early afternoon ...”

“... have the bright idea of taking that pompous phrase literally and pretending that he and his foil, Richard Murdoch, were living in a flat at the top of Broadcasting House. For some reason this fancy captivated the nation, and from it developed a wonderful gallimaufry of imaginary characters – Lewis the Goat, Mrs Bagwash, her daughter Nausea. It established ...”

“... seems the days are gone when one could read Muldoon simply unaided.) With Madoc I read Richard Holmes’s Coleridge: Early Visions. Ironically, this wasn’t used by Muldoon: Madoc would have been finished by the autumn of 1989, when it came out. Some astonishing correspondences between the two books are therefore coincidental, the meeting of two ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”