“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... defending the American colonists in their struggle not to be taxed by a Parliament three thousand miles away, not simply because there must be no taxation without representation and it would be absurd to send American MPs to Westminster, but also because the colonists had grown away from their mother country, grown too ‘Whiggish’ for their internal ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... finally on the wrong side. The discovery of ancient funerary urns in a Norfolk field, some thirty miles from Norwich, prompted the writing of Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658). Browne was intrigued by this local find, and his brief treatise on the subject is a mix of archaeological notes and antiquarian learning that blossoms into a reflection on last ...”

“... defenceless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas.’ (Arkansas is six hundred miles from the Mexican border.) Ernst, who was rumoured to be on the vice-presidential shortlist, says that Obama has ‘become a dictator’ and should be impeached. She told an NRA convention that she’d take up her Smith & Wesson against the government ...”

“... Haven and the River Welland discharge into the Wash. The hypothetical breach was more than three miles from the Quadrant site, but the effects were severe. Taking predicted higher sea levels into account, a bad storm surge combined with a breach at that point in 2115 would cover the entire Quadrant site in water to a depth of between one and two ...”

“... my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters, When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Jarrell was drafted late in 1942. ‘Being in the army,’ he wrote, ‘is like being involved in the ...”

“... Boot says. He made a smooth transition to Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ institution ninety miles south of Dixon, with Social Gospel roots. ‘Dutch would go from success to success, untroubled by the taint of failure,’ Boot writes. He was ‘a cocky SOB, a loud talker’, a classmate said. And when he talked, people listened. At the beginning of his ...”

“... Tarantino’s characters swear all the time – there are even more motherfuckers here than in Miles Davis’s autobiography – and are more or less impossible to understand. Tarantino has come to be seen as a kind of Post-Modern primitive, neither immoral nor amoral but pre-moral, a kid who loves the shoot-’em-ups in movies and hasn’t even thought ...”

“... Ministry of Defence, assessing the dangers of a major accident at the Trident base at Faslane (25 miles from Glasgow and about forty from half the population of Scotland) concluded that the ‘societal contamination’ that would result meant that ‘the risks are close to the tolerability criterion level’. But these are old-fashioned issues. Onwards to ...”

“... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...”

“... whereas temporal immigrants feel usurped. For spatial immigrants, the old country is thousands of miles away in another place, whereas for temporal immigrants, the old country is right there, buried under the new one, and they have no way of digging it out, except through revolution, or the ballot box, or, if the right guy should come along, a revolution and ...”

“... forced labour ‘had practically exterminated the existing population for a distance of fifty miles either side of the track’. In 1915, one HCB official admitted that most of the workforce of Leverville consisted of slaves who were handed a workbook, a machete and a blanket and set to work. It was said that few men would choose to work there, especially ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... by Clinton as she races round the globe, visiting 112 countries and logging nearly a million miles (as she repeatedly tells us). Energised by ‘a bias for action’, she pursues a frenetic agenda: promoting international economic agreements that will allow nations to ‘play by the rules’ on ‘a level playing field’, ‘creating jobs and exciting ...”