“... 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 ...”

“... work shifts in a huddle of prefabs, rotating in from Smithton, the nearest small settlement, sixty miles away by bush road. High over their heads a mast topped by air-sampling instruments soars another two hundred feet. Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station is one of an international chain, all in out-of-the-way places, far from human habitation – Barrow ...”

“... President enquired how much time he had before his next appointment. Enough, it seemed. There are miles of such security tapes generated every day in Federal Government buildings. To have been kept for five years and located immediately, this particular extract must have been clipboarded as a matter of clandestine ribaldry by White House underlings (‘Some ...”

“... nature as it is of his writing, and the man who wrote in 1792 that he had ‘not journey’d 20 miles from home these 20 years’ was in agonies at the prospect of going into society because he feared he might not behave as he should. ‘I would have given the world to have been excused, sensible that I was unfit for company, and fearing lest I should ...”

“... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the instructions of our ...”

“... and Rousseau was briefly exquisitely happy with Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, rented to him by Richard Davenport for a pittance. Then he took it into his head that Hume was mocking him behind his back; he also decided that Hume had been subsidising his stay in England, and of all the things calculated to render Rousseau entirely irrational, trying to help ...”

“... red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’ A corporal with whom he had fallen in some kind of love, Richard Rhodes, was shot on sight when mistakenly trying to enter a German trench, and Gurney mourned his youth and beauty in ‘Dicky’: ‘Can Death, all slayer, kill/The fervent source of those exultant fires?/Nay, not so;/Somewhere that glow/And starry shine ...”

“... in 1678 and became the first Englishman to make the journey to Mecca and return, long before Richard Burton’s celebrated voyage in 1853. Pitts converted to Islam, as so many in his situation did, and although he remained a slave until 1693, when he managed to escape, he seems to have been treated well and to have formed a largely favourable view of his ...”

“... climatic systems that, in the ‘weather year’ between June 1997 and July 1998, toppled 72,000 miles of power and telephone lines in Quebec (leaving the region ‘without power for nearly a month’), then over-heated Auckland so thoroughly that 120 blocks of downtown ‘became a ghost town’ and ‘scores of businesses were driven to bankruptcy’ as a ...”

“... Colebrook, was completely deaf. They were the inspiration, it might seem, for the movie starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder called See No Evil, Hear No Evil, which had the immortal tagline ‘Dave is deaf, and Wally is blind.’ ‘It may be regarded,’ Holman wrote in his account of the journey, ‘as a curious incident in our travelling connection ...”

“... curls which would later prove a boon to caricaturists. He grew up at Villers-Cotterêts, fifty miles north-east of Paris, where he was happy and largely impervious to education. At 15 he was set to work in a lawyer’s office but dreamed of literary glory. In 1823 he moved to Paris, where he read insatiably, and wrote unperformable plays, overheated poems ...”

“... of her teens had been ugly and treeless. There was one miserable little sluggish stream about 18 miles from our ranch. It was perhaps ten feet wide in the spring, and in the late summer it was no more than a series of black mud holes at the bottom of a ravine, with a few cottonwoods and dwarf elms growing along its banks. I remember that my little brothers ...”

“... shirt and wrinkle-free suit, jet lag stamped on his face. He’s flown more than three million miles in the last quarter century – further than any of the men who set foot on the moon … He blends in with all the middle-aged men in first class whom you pass on your way to coach, because he’s one of them … They’re his tribe. Even more of a ...”

“... country’s ‘90 per cent’ losses reported by the press are too high. The naturalist and author Richard Mabey believes that resistance in the Danish ash population is 5-10 per cent and probably higher in Lithuania. I noticed this upbeat tone too in Julian Roughton, chief executive of the Suffolk Woodland Trust, as he showed me around Arger Fen, a stretch of ...”

“... by Jones, some gleefully outing him as a Supreme Court judge – that Jones was now five thousand miles away, immersed in philology and comparative jurisprudence. His friends or admirers, from Richard Price to Mary Wollstonecraft, might be making trouble, but at least he wouldn’t be replying to Burke’s ...”