“... 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 ...”

“... parts of the empire, whose men were enlisted in the struggle by Britain. I wouldn’t go as far as Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, who called the poppy installation ‘a Ukip style memorial’. But he has a point. I wonder whether next year we will remember that we wouldn’t have ‘won’ the Battle of Waterloo without General Blücher and his Prussians. The ...”

“... When Jonathan Lethem was born, in 1964, his mother had dropped out of college and was piercing ears with a pin and ice-cube in Greenwich Village, where she ran with a crowd of folksingers including Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs. His father, in an early phase of his career as an artist, was painting basketball hoops, vices and stereopticons ...”

“... inside offer views over the Pennines, Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of industrial, rather than post-industrial, satellites, which do not accord with the RGS’s ‘Discovering Britain’, an embarrassing programme of ‘Marmite landscapes’ and ‘tiny treasure hunts’. There are yet further views, equally outside the RGS ...”

“... part from each other, we might have come in sight of those hills which skirt the road for so many miles, and thus continuing our journey ... I fancied that we should have seen so deeply into each others hearts, and been so fondly locked in each others arms, that we should have braved the worst and parted no more.’ ‘Under that tree,’ he continues, his ...”

“... was sitting in the Acropole Hotel, having failed to leave the country. Not Greece – she was 1500 miles from the shores of the Aegean in a dusty, impoverished tip of a city. The Acropole is a Greek family business in Khartoum. The proprietors and the picture on the hotel stationery are the only connections with Athens, both of them tenuous. Stranded in ...”

“... Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able to remember what it had been about. Mellers has, at the very least, used his ...”

“... Rachel’s mother and stepfather in Carver, Mass., a small town of relatively modest means, fifty miles south of Boston. English people fresh to the United States are often shaken to find themselves in hyperreality. The landscape, so familiar in two dimensions from television, movies and print, suddenly, unsettlingly, takes on a third. From my own first ...”

“... USSR in 1922. It consisted of little more than a thin region around Minsk and was barely a hundred miles wide. A few years later, the Kremlin transferred Gomel, Mogilev and Vitebsk from Russian to Belarusian communist rule for what Wilson calls ‘instrumental reasons’. Stalin wanted to build Belarus up within the Soviet Union, partly to appeal to ethnic kin ...”

“... cavalier way with sources generate occasional bafflement. We are told that a man once walked 22 miles after work to attend her Sussex night school and that not all the students at Benslow House could cope with the trapeze. But the book succeeds as an essay on Being Barbara – as a hymn to her positivity and naturalness, her capacity to raise the spirits of ...”

“... on their rucksacks as they criss-crossed Europe meeting up with pen pals and old army buddies. Jonathan Purkis, a self-described ‘vagabond sociologist’, sees hitchhiking as the inheritor of a long tradition celebrating self-sufficient travel, dating back to Lao Tzu’s aphorisms (the journey as more important than the destination) and medieval ...”

“... Two thousand miles​ north-west of Rio de Janeiro, the Javari Valley is a swathe of the Brazilian Amazon larger than Scotland and accessible only by boat or helicopter. Its ecological riches and isolated tribes – sixteen known groups, the largest concentration of uncontacted peoples on earth, with drones intermittently detecting the vestiges of other tribes – have tempted outsiders for decades ...”

“... praise, is reverentially read by all. Borrow of the mighty stride – he could cover more than 30 miles a day and always counted on doing the last lap to the pub at six miles an hour – Borrow the mysterious, the adventurous, the polyglot, the pugilist, the dodgy lover has been thrown into an unregarded corner. Up in ...”

“... acte gratuit would be to give a man your cloak as well when he asks for your coat or to go two miles when he asks you to go one. The influence of existentialism is at its strongest in Terence’s first strictly literary critical book, Shakespeare and Society (1967). The Leavisite inflection is still there as Shakespeare is read in terms of the tensions ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen​ has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the retrograde, of revival of old forms or subject matter. Published at the turn of the millennium, The Corrections is a work of its time, not for its topical themes of dementia, the medicated society or stock market chicanery but for its approach to family ...”