“... Run into Philip and Kersti French in M&S with Philip bent tight over his trolley and using it as a walker. I ask him how he is. ‘Dreadful’. ‘Anything specific?’ ‘Knees. Legs. Lungs. Kidneys … Shall I go on?’ The recital so fluent it’s partly a joke, but looking at him it’s hard not to believe every word. I come out not, I’m sure, having ...”

“... is even better. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir ...”

“... vides was published in 1974, which is late for the scholarship pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the ...”

“... alongside the new site, were required as parking space for the 2012 green Olympics. Johnnie Walker, chairman of the Hackney and Leyton Sunday Football League, was enraged: despite assurances from a multitude of faceless authorities that work would not begin for four years, the diggers arrived before the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled ...”

“... to make this landscape one of abiding importance to Beckett, who, like his father, was a great walker. These early letters make clear that, despite his lack of interest in Ireland or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to McGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic ...”

“... of policy and to the courts on matters of law. When a Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, was sued by John Wilkes for punitive damages for having unlawfully issued a general warrant to search for seditious papers, Chief Justice Wilmot told the jury: ‘The law makes no difference between great and petty officers. Thank God, they are all amenable to ...”

“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for poverty and violence. ‘A land of blood and beer,’ a rector of Hawksmoor’s ...”

“... Israel, who became her lover and one of the great influences on her life. He introduced her to Walker Evans, who was, in 1938, the first photographer ever to have a solo show at MoMA. ‘He was totally overwhelmed’ by Arbus’s work, Evans’s wife recalled. ‘He saw that the pictures were posed. He admired that very much – her courage. He saw some of ...”

“... other. Sicilia ‘is his situation’, and his situation is that of a man who, like a high-wire-walker looking down, senses a ‘Nothing’ in love: who shakes hands, as over a Vast; and embraces as it were from the ends of opposed Winds.Like Shylock and Malvolio and perhaps Angelo, Leontes is a man who cannot play. He is invested with a form of helpless ...”

“... his fingers across Mungo’s belly. He allowed himself a daydream as he traced his imaginary walker across the pale stomach, into the gullies of his hips and across the rise in his breastbone. Mungo’s skin was a snowy plain, a landscape of unblemished emptiness.’ The exploration is emotional as well as physical, or more emotional than physical, with ...”

“... Dickens’s suffering as he later and very emotionally recalled it for his friend and biographer, John Forster. He was not beaten, starved or ill-treated in any way. The factory was run by an acquired cousin, the son of a widower who had married Dickens’s aunt. He worked there for a year or less before returning to school and normal middle-class life. What ...”

“... store. On midsummer’s night in 1955 a tall, broad-shouldered farmer 17 years her senior, John Warren, took her to the stock car racing, and a year later, when Wendy was 21, they got married. John Warren rented 175 acres from the local squire in Dunton Bassett, a village in the south-west of the county. He’d been ...”

“... true, when so much else has changed? To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that contribute to a pattern. It’s the landscape the eye seeks, not any of the fields making it up. Most fields have no individuality to a stranger; at best, a fine oak in the middle, or a pretty horse grazing. Few ...”