“... to major doses of radiation. The disasters occurred at the top-secret Mayak complex, located fifty miles north of Chelyabinsk. Covering 200 square kilometres, Mayak was the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear weapons factory for over forty years. It has been called ‘the most polluted spot on earth’, a judgment not disputed by the Mayak official I interviewed ...”

“... Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with oakum. The table surface was a finely-shaved sheet of freshwater ice; the balls were hand-carved from ...”

“... children, imprisonment – or pressure to inform on others. Since unification these files, 111 miles of them, have been administered by a body popularly known as the ‘Gauck authority’ after the former East German pastor who directs it. By June 1996, it had fielded over a million applications from individuals seeking to inspect their own files. The ...”

“... is capable of drawing a line from, say, the Warburgian theorising of the retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes to the biopolitics of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral ...”

“... tire, never get sick, never threaten each other. And they never say why.) Kötting did the hard miles with his grandmother, Gladys Morris (a voice), and his daughter Eden (a presence). His expedition begins on the pebbles alongside the De La Warr Pavilion. I walked with Kötting to view the pyramidical tomb of James Burton, founding speculator of St ...”

“... Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... all self-help, to make people smile by first making them cry. Celebrity Fit Club is not a million miles away, together with DIY shows and cookery programmes that provoke people into thinking their life’s troubles can be vanished away with an apt deployment of cushions and fresh coriander. Nobody doubts it; everybody’s buying.2 This thinking has now been ...”

“... that he was being sent on a real mission instead, and that he was to fly to a point thirty miles west. When Fravor arrived at the location he saw an object ‘about the size of a 737’ – so nearly 140 feet long – beneath the surface of the sea. Above it was a wingless, fifty-foot-long UFO shaped like a ‘tic-tac’, which flew in erratic patterns ...”

“... But there were only so many options for a single-crop economy of seven million people ninety miles from the Florida coast. After Kennedy, in April 1961, signed off on the coup Eisenhower had planned, and incompetently executed it, nothing was going to repair relations (in the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mailer proposed easing relations by ...”

“... that was neither strictly moral nor strictly bourgeois. John Gilliam drove his horse and cart six miles from Portisham to the Golden Grape wreck ‘with intent to buy some of the goods that were salved out of the said ship for his money’. As pay for carting cargo he was given a barrel of raisins, which he managed to sell for 35 shillings. Alice Mathews did ...”

“... of many islets’, marked by local specialisms. Birmingham was strong in industrial sociology, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall had pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international ...”

“... inside offer views over the Pennines, Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of industrial, rather than post-industrial, satellites, which do not accord with the RGS’s ‘Discovering Britain’, an embarrassing programme of ‘Marmite landscapes’ and ‘tiny treasure hunts’. There are yet further views, equally outside the RGS ...”

“... from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the Salieri Express for Budapest, then chuffs on to Milan, from where it cruises to a luxurious island on Lake Como, then to Lausanne. A brief interlude on Lake Geneva is ...”

“... restaurant, and there order for both of them all the rich food he had travelled several hundred miles to hear himself forbidden. In two other respects, he tried somewhat harder to follow his doctor’s orders. Every summer he started a cure at Marienbad, or Carlsbad, or Pau, though he invariably broke it off after a week, and spent the rest of his holiday ...”