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“... at 100,000 livres, it had a top speed of some 70 mph and could cover anything up to eight hundred miles a day. Finding no customers, Desforges himself took a machine to the top of the Tour Guinette and was launched by four tough peasants. He plummeted directly to the ground. And so it was with all the early birdmen. Cautious spirits, like Leonardo da ...”

“... Parkinson’s disease, in Ivan Vaughan’s book, becomes a fascinating, even thrilling experience. Jonathan Miller talks in his introduction of Ivan ‘surmounting his disease by regarding it as a treasured possession and not just as an abominable affliction’, and that is exactly right. The experience of the disease becomes a voyage of discovery – about ...”

“... and soil impose perennial constraints on warfare and agriculture. A striking example is found in Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China: ‘Chiang Kai-shek [in 1949] had roughly the same range of options that had faced the southern Ming court once the Manchus had seized Peking and the North China plain 305 years before. He could try to consolidate a ...”

“... writing – the traveller going to an unexciting location and reporting on his lack of excitement; Jonathan Raban and Hugo Williams purvey this mode as well. Is it that old-style travellers chose their destinations better? Did they perhaps fake their enthusiasm? Or was the world simply fresher then? Today’s travellers may claim a greater truthfulness by ...”

“... the Reagan Administration. Long queues of voters waiting in the broiling sunshine or trudging for miles on country roads produced a powerful image of eager, sturdy democracy, which almost every American reporter and TV commentator fell for. In fact, the turn-out was barely half as high as the Administration claimed: an analysis by researchers at the ...”

“... day. Monet taught me how to see it. Straight ahead, on my left, is the Chicago skyline. A few miles along, two trees seem to grow up out of the water, in a large V-shape, like a giant catapult. Standing between the trees you can line up the entire cityscape. The conversation Socrates and Phaedrus had about beauty must have taken place here; somehow, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rippled like a corrugated roof, making travel in our hired minivan unbearable even at five miles an hour. What should have been a six-hour journey took 23. I was on the way to the Taliban’s Kandahar heartland with a colleague from the New York Times. We had seen wide-eyed young Taliban fighters in Kabul, like peasant boys parachuted into ...”

“... A lorry driver blocks the Blackwall Tunnel and 250,000 vehicles are jammed across 16 square miles of London. Police won’t release the driver’s name, fearing for his safety. We can’t speed up the flow of urban traffic – more roads produce more cars, and congestion soon becomes as bad as it was before. Ian Parker describes in Autopia how a signal ...”

“... with Camilla. What made her so special? She was, he later told his official biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, a ‘pretty’ and ‘bubbly’ girl, who ‘laughed easily and at the same sillinesses’ as Charles himself. Tyrrel is more blunt. Camilla was, she says, a ‘big-bosomed Goons fan’. But she clearly offered something more than this. Patty ...”

“... and are the one in charge, even if you end up getting apples instead because the pears look bad. Jonathan Meades is a writer who understands the power of lists. In An Encyclopedia of Myself, he has written not so much an autobiography as a series of detailed inventories of English provincial life in the 1950s – a world of sadistic army majors and ...”

“... for a ‘party’ in the unlikely setting of Qudsaya, an impoverished hill town about eight miles northwest of the city. As the guests drive up the steep streets to the town’s small central square, young men, some with scarves wrapped round their faces, look out for signs of danger. The ‘party’ is actually a protest against Bashar al-Assad’s ...”

“... Jonathan Raban is afraid of the sea, saying it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a competent one. One good reason for sailing is that, being a writer, he likes to write about having sailed. Sailing is guaranteed to provide alarms and achievements for his pen to celebrate ...”

“... Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy describes the practice of a woman doctor working alone in an inner-city wasteland: The receptionist was replacing a lavatory seat when we arrived. The other had been torn off. So that I could be shown round, a cupboard was unlocked and inside it was a small metal wall safe. Inside that, row upon row of keys ...”

“... and the road becomes vulnerable to attack. A journalist from Wardak province, just forty miles from Kabul, has not been able to go home for the last six years. The Taliban have recently been stepping up assassinations of government officials and anyone associated with Western-supported NGOs. Another Kabuli with relatives in Wardak said that over the ...”