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“... 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 ...”

“... technique: ‘An aesthetic of 20th-century bridge design had sprung to life, with the architects miles away.’ Architects have typically asserted the rationality of designs in which aesthetics play a large part; engineers assert the converse. Saint quotes an aeronautical engineer who said (in 1922, but it is still convincing) that ‘aeroplanes are not ...”

“... a look-out point, though only whales and fish-poachers can be seen this side of Antarctica, 4500 miles away. The sou-wester that bore the First Fleet past in 1788 strikes it like Thor’s hammer. Most days, ten seconds of deep breathing here is guaranteed to clear brain cells of all content, including ‘in the meantime’ depression. Back in the Café ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”