“... raw sewage and indestructible sanitary and convenience products spewing into London’s river. Taylor Geall, the bright young fabulist charged by his Super Sewer employers, Tideway, with selling an upbeat message about reconnecting Londoners with the Thames (even when large sections of river frontage were closed off for the construction), commutes from ...”

“... Conrad, Henry James and others; final illness and death. The chief woman in Crane’s life, Cora Taylor, belongs to the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden artist’s palette. The room was full of late Victorian clutter: an end table ...”

“... an exaggerated relish that suggests insecurity. In this, he was unlike the much tougher A.J.P. Taylor, who came to Oxford from middle-class Lancashire and was able to view the place with affectionate detachment. Taylor got on sturdily with his work. Trevor-Roper let himself be drawn into energy-sapping college ...”

“... the one in Nottingham any Saturday night – a sign by the loos plaintively reads: MIAMI, 4378 MILES —>.) The ethnography of Hooters culture by ‘Richard Baldwin’ – one of the collaborators’ pseudonyms, actually the borrowed name of one of their friends, a 71-year-old former champion bodybuilder and emeritus professor of the humanities at Gulf ...”

“... a ditch. Where had they come from? Where were they going? The nearest place, east or west, was 30 miles distant. There was no vehicle in sight that could have brought them to Questa, or that was going to take them away. On they marched. Tap, tap, tap, went their little drums. Trample, shuffle, trample, went their bare or sandalled feet on the side of the ...”

“... quality. ‘Mercado’s Federal Army, after its dramatic and terrible retreat four hundred miles across the desert when Chihuahua was abandoned, lay three months at Ojinaga on the Rio Grande.’ Here is a young American writer already practised in the literary tricks of his day, devices which Hemingway, among many others, was soon to develop and ...”

“... for Hungary ‘since you know the Balkans’. Major Grand’s Chief of Staff, the late George Taylor, who had come from Australia (it is very much that kind of story), was unimpressed when I objected that while I had sojourned in Yugoslavia, a manner of Katmandu for the dissident young of those remote times, I had never done so in Hungary, which was ...”

“... for example, where at the end of a political party conference the delegates are Away, by miles and years, from the blood of the Lamb That clotted in their youth: a tourist’s stain On arras or flagged floor, touched up by time yet they sing secular words just as bloodthirsty as any that their rejected Christianity once required of them; and ...”

“... one-time Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of teeth that ...”

“... Dean try to create the edgy Jett Rink by keeping his bladder full for a scene with Elizabeth Taylor, and then, after blowing his lines, dealing with his awe of Taylor by emptying his bladder in full sight of her, the crew and several thousand movie-struck onlookers. (A good moment to recall Laurence Olivier’s comment ...”

“... Nikolaus Pevsner, begetter, editor and principal author of the series, had travelled thousands of miles over those years. England and its buildings had also come a long way. To read the first editions as they were never meant to be read, chronologically, is to follow two stories. One is the tale of postwar optimism in which nostalgia, the quest for a once and ...”

“... to become pregnant – and endured the correct society of Berlin. Then she was transferred ninety miles away to Nasserheide, the Count’s vast derelict estate in Pomerania. It was there, during the blissful months of his absence on business, that the idea of a garden came to her. Whether it ever actually existed, apart from the great pines and lilacs which ...”

“... like antelope or songbirds. In winter they leave the California coast and head out thousands of miles to Hawaii. In August, they return to congregate at ‘hub spots’ off the California coast, including one just off a popular beach near Monterey. In between they go to the ‘White Shark Café’, a remote, empty area halfway between Baja California and ...”

“... years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the battle, I drove over the hills five hundred miles to the east, from Dresden to Prague. After crossing the Czech border, you reach a weird half-barren landscape of stunted trees and harsh ravines. This is the Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains, which run for miles along the ...”

“... and British Policy in Iran: The End of Informal Empire, 1941-53 (Bloomsbury, £28.99), Jack Taylor describes their lives of relative luxury at Grangemouth’s sister refinery in Abadan. (He suggests that the Scottish manager of the oil-linked Imperial Bank of Persia may have been responsible for introducing football to Iran.) In the 1950s Anglo-Persian ...”