“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... area anything up to a hundred thousand fires, with a circumference of between sixty to a hundred miles’. Nowhere would be ‘free from the risk of radioactive contamination’. The danger of starvation would be high in the short term, and significant in the long term too: crops, animals and land would all be contaminated. In badly hit areas ‘there might ...”

“... village telling or rather entreating the hordes of tourists to go home. In our village twenty miles or so away the car park is full and the place far busier than on a normal Sunday. So far from social distancing some of the visitors practically link arms. Still, it makes a change from brawling over toilet rolls.26 March. Around six Nick Hytner ...”

“... 75 cruise missiles, costing $750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles south of Khost), the site of a major al-Qaida meeting. The attack killed 21 Pakistanis but bin Laden was forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence. Two of the missiles fell short into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to denounce the US action. At the same ...”

“... saint St Nicholas, while the evil entity in the Mordvin pantheon is Shyaytan, not a million miles from that evil construct of Judaism and Christianity, Satan. The word ‘pagan’ keeps creeping back – not least in the subtitle of Young’s book – because of its convenience. It has the advantage of alerting us to problems in our assumptions about ...”

“... Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore headphones; all you could hear was the giggles and gasps. On ...”

“... had been intense. In 1797, aged 25, on the verge of entering the Unitarian ministry, he walked 40 miles to see her: he thought of her then as ‘that great and excellent woman’, and as one of the great prose stylists in the language. If the original conversation about ‘The Ancient Mariner’ really took place it must have occurred around the turn of the ...”

“... It is not so clear that the Titanic would have remained in the collective memory without the war. Richard Davenport-Hines quotes Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, in which he says that at the time he thought it foreshadowed disaster. But he was writing more than thirty years later. Only a few weeks after the sinking Conrad wrote that in its ...”

“... one by one, dismantled and shipped off. The Mini Eggs production line was trucked the thousand miles to the new factory in the village of Skarbimierz in February 2010. In March, Caramel and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”