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“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening years ...”

“... types and tribes which Kim encounters on his journeyings – their monochrome precision is miles away from Kim’s evocation of richly flavoured, brightly coloured, ever-moving life. All that we must add for ourselves. But what we add it to is so circumstantial, so revealing in detail, so inclusive in its often dour record of appearances (and so devoid ...”

“... a motoring tour and was much impressed by it. It seemed to me just the town which ought to be two miles away from Blandings Castle.’ This late-revealed statement will put the cat among the pigeons in the tight little world of Wodehouse topographical scholarship. In this context the names of two retired soldiers, Colonel Norman Murphy in Cumbria and Colonel ...”

“... he was to be released into permanent exile in Central Asia. This began in 1953 in Kok Terek, many miles to the south of his labour camp but still in Kazakhstan. The local authorities were wary of employing him in his former profession of schoolteacher, but by persistence, and the revelation of his talents as mathematician and pedagogue, he achieved his ...”

“... music could have explored’. Further support for his case can be adduced from the fact that Miles Davis and Hendrix were playing and hanging out together a year before Hendrix’s death. There were hopes that the two men would make a recording, but it never happened. In his recent Autobiography, however, Davis is just as condescending about Hendrix as ...”

“... wonders whether Tesla was behind the Tunguska Event, a ten-megaton blast that destroyed 830 square miles of Siberian forest on 30 June 1908: The story was abroad that Tesla, seeking to communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic, projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his ...”

“... and 19-man crew were left with only their whaleboats and scant provisions, two and a half thousand miles from the South American coast in the vast, empty Pacific. They did not sail for the nearest land – the Marquesas, Tuamotu and Tahitian islands – which stretched from several hundred to two thousand miles away under ...”

“... he is an English-born novelist, the son of a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother. In How many miles to Babylon? he tells us that he came home from his London school complaining that the other children called him a wog: his Scottish grandmother gave him the well-meant, useless advice that he should tell his schoolfellows that the word meant ...”

“... include the late Bee Gee Robin Gibb, the mobile phone baron John Caudwell and the pornographer Richard Desmond: their name liveth for evermore all right, prominently, in a niche on the western side of the structure. The memorial to the 55,573 nameless dead airmen of Bomber Command and its few thousand survivors has evidently been squatted by fiscally ...”

“... woolly mammoths, in order to sustain a viable population, would have to be the size of Wales (see Richard Fortey’s article in this issue). A handy website, www.simonkelk.co.uk/sizeofwales.html, has a ‘Walesometer’ for converting hectares/acres/square miles/square kilometres into Waleses. It shouldn’t be too long ...”

“... drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel. I got to know both of my travelling companions during a brief period living in the town of Marfa, Texas, which is also where I found the ...”

“... Woolf? ... I’m Graves.’ He appeared to have been rushing through the air at sixty miles an hour and to have alighted temporarily ... The poor boy is all emphasis, protestation and pose. He has a crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ... The usual self-consciousness of young men, especially as he ...”

“... and was thin to the point of emaciation. He had travelled down from the city of Agra, four hundred miles to the north, and it is a fairly safe bet that he had done so on foot. Coryate is not much heard of nowadays, but in his time he was famous. I have always been curious about him, and finding myself in India earlier this year I decided to visit some of the ...”

“... give these people baths they’ll only put coal in them.’ Even sitting writing this review 18 miles away in the bourgeois fastness of Leamington Spa, I feel pretty offended myself at the attribution of low-life character to any of my Warwickshire neighbours. Here in the West Midlands we all come from somewhere else, as George Eliot pointed out when ...”

“... in 230 ad, Baekdu Mountain on the Chinese-North Korean border in 969 and Mount Rinjani, a hundred miles or so west of Tambora, in 1257. By comparison, Vesuvius in 79 ad, Krakatoa in 1883 and Pinatubo in 1991 had a vei of 6 (more than 10 km3); Mount St Helens in 1980 had a vei of 5 (more than 1 km3); Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 had a vei of 4 (more than 0.1 ...”