“... 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 ...”

“... his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show. The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for dead by his companions, he somehow made it back to Fort Kiowa in South Dakota, two hundred miles away, with a view to revenging himself on those who had abandoned him. The legend proved as resilient as the man. Its more recent reiterations include two Hollywood blockbusters: Man in the Wilderness (1971) and the multiple Oscar-winning The Revenant ...”

“... in Lhasa, while the Panchen Lamas have ruled from the monastery of Tashilhunpo, near Shigatse, 160 miles west of Lhasa. The last Panchen Lama, the tenth, died in 1989 under suspicious circumstances at Tashilhunpo – poisoned, according to the prevailing rumour, by the Chinese security services for his outspoken views. His premature death devastated Tibet, but ...”

“... response to a Rorschach test), includes a scene in which three members of the Sackler family, Richard, David and Theresa, are shown attending a court hearing over Zoom. As parent after parent testifies to the suffering and loss of their child, the Sacklers look on impassively, sometimes impatiently. The actions of PAIN, inspired by those of ACT UP during ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”