“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”