“... is a massively ugly parody-arch in the middle of nowhere. You see it coming up on the horizon from miles away. (‘The majestic Memorial to the Missing,’ says Miss Coombs, ‘stands amid fields still scarred with the trench lines of the Leipzig Redoubt.’) Blakey would call it fugly. Loads of Castles among the 73,000-or-so incised names, though nobody known ...”

“... Diop drew a community of black intellectuals, including African Americans like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, to the offices of Présence Africaine. Andrade was working with Césaire on a new edition of his long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and compiling an anthology of African poetry. In 1956 Diop organised the first Congress of Black Writers ...”

“... invited the Times’s New York lawyer down to discuss it, he booked the visitor into a motel forty miles away under an assumed name. Would it have mattered if the national press had been scared off by those libel actions and had stopped paying close attention to the racial conflict? I think it would have made a great difference. Most Americans were not aware ...”

“... our place – un-air-conditioned, and where we will share a bed – she has already walked seven miles, been to the Pantheon, and sent me a picture of a McDonald’s billboard with a picture of French fries above the word ‘Gnammm’.I feel I have hardly left the house, or the inside of my own head, since Jason’s surgery last summer. Hope and I have, we ...”

“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... inaccessible to sea-going ships; they usually transferred their cargoes at Greenock, three or four miles further west, to smaller vessels, barges and wherries that were rowed or poled the final twenty-odd miles to the Glasgow warehouses. Greenock’s near monopoly in the transhipment business irritated Glasgow’s merchants ...”

“... lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours ...”

“... at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on disgust, observes ‘that misguided collection of misfits known as The Queers’ assembling after dusk (they sound like a band from a couple of decades ...”

“... it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in 1964, but cultural studies proper only really started after Hall took over as director a few years later: ‘What is the discipline? We didn’t have one. In a way we had to construct it. Not because we had huge ambitions to be ...”

“... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an ...”

“... Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The ...”

“... beside him for a ‘who wore it best’ picture, which ricocheted around the internet.Thousands of miles away, an Egyptian looter scrolling through a celebrity gossip website on his smartphone saw the picture. He recognised Nedjemankh instantly: he and his colleagues had dug the golden coffin out of the ground six years earlier, without bothering to preserve ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... order, a Principal Agreement was signed in March 1931 formally granting the IPC 32,000 square miles of Iraqi territory. A hastily convened Iraqi parliament rubber-stamped a deal endorsing the IPC demand that no taxes be levied, in return for a trifling one-time payment by the consortium. Here was the concessionary economy at work. A ramshackle ...”

“... and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and fired his Tory ...”