“... 265,000 Italians surrendered and 400,000 fled in confusion, while the pursuing forces advanced 50 miles in just over two days. Most important of all, the October Revolution and the disintegration of the tsarist army took Russia out of the war. This enabled the Germans to redeploy huge numbers of troops – their forces on the Western Front increased from 3.25 ...”

“... of pater estquem nuptiæ demonstrant; his consequent misfortunes involve him with a villain called Richard Craufurd, whom Bulwer-Lytton based on the banker Henry Fauntleroy, who had been hanged for forgery before a crowd of 100,000 people at Newgate in 1824. The central male figure in Lucretia is an artist, murderer and forger called Gabriel Varney, who was ...”

“... professionals must be included Robert and Monica Beckinsale; among the self-confessed amateurs, Richard Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet of ...”

“... Boeing 747, loaded with enough fuel for a transatlantic flight, hit the ground at more than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth. Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 ...”

“... the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While negotiations were going on at Mile End, another group of rebels dragged the ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”

“... Otis Redding​ was born in 1941 on a farm in Terrell County, Georgia, 150 miles south of Atlanta, but raised further north in Macon, a small, bustling city at the geographical centre of the state. Of the cotton fields but not from them, he was a sharecropper’s son who grew up in an early iteration of America’s inner-city projects, forming a gospel quartet with the neighbourhood boys, joining a junior choir at the church where his father was a deacon, banging away on a drum set his mother bought him with money she had earned as an Avon lady in town ...”

“... that this alleged evidence is a natural geological structure, a syncline, located about 20 miles from Mount Ararat in Turkey – not far as the raven flies from the Black Sea. A syncline is a structure produced by gentle tectonic forces, a fold in strata, shaped like a cupped hand. If one developed in bedded rocks of the right thickness it might ...”

“... through the light drifts of tear-gas. Four students were arrested. Meanwhile, less than ten miles away, a thousand shacks had been destroyed and twenty, twenty-five thousand blacks had been made homeless. I could understand how the children of the middle classes, returning from Crossroads where they did much of the relief work, could resolve to have ...”

“... man who escapes the nullness of life in posh London to become a scared, amateur spook in Beirut. Richard, the hero of Heart’s journey in Winter, is another ambiguous journalist-spy, this time in Cold War Germany. John Pitt’s historical moment – Iran during the Revolution – is the most dramatic of all, and his relationship with the British ...”

“... we had determined weeks before the Demidenko affair reached its final phase to give the prize to Richard Flanagan, for his magical-realist investigation of Tasmania’s history, The Death of a River Guide. Helen Demidenko published her novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, in 1994, when she was 23. She claimed that, like the narrator of her book, she had a ...”

“... spent a huge sum outfitting itself. On the opening day the road to Eglinton was clogged for thirty miles as 100,000 commoners (it was said) gathered to watch Scott’s romances brought to life. But within a few hours a raging storm sent them slogging homeward through morasses of mud, and the blue-blooded cast and audience, their Medieval hair-dos now sodden ...”

“... those who determined the ‘mother lode’ from which they were derived – in some cases many miles away. They were used subsequently as evidence in support of the universal deluge. Now we know them to have been dumped as the glaciers of the last Ice Age melted away. It’s curious that the identity of these investigators should be frozen in the names of ...”

“... targets are a ghastly pair called Gen and Eric, whose spare room in Greenwich is invaded by Miles Garth, a man they hardly know, after they invite him to dinner. The action, in both novels, tends to be seen from the point of view of outsiders, particularly children, who are above or outside the adults’ cheap compromises (children ‘are so true’, a ...”

“... ditches, quarries and mines. A man of great physical strength, he thought nothing of walking sixty miles in pursuit of a few new marks on his template of British geology. He was compelled to seek patronage from the aristocracy to further his research, and there were times when such patronage was in short supply. But in the early years of the 19th century ...”