“... Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant Swedish poet and fiction writer Lars Gustafsson turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My Relatives. According to her mother, Regina, ‘no one was ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... who preceded her into Lebanese exile. They have all the family documents to prove that the three-storey house on the corner of Mukhaless and Shabatai Levy streets was theirs, along with the British mandate deeds showing that Jad Tawil – Selma’s brother, Samir and Fayez’s father – bought the house from another Palestinian Arab in 1938. On the top of ...”

“... street in Old Westbury, Long Island. Their houses were huge and garlanded with bling: ‘the three-storey foyer that makes a man feel like a god; the $17,000 front door imported from northern Italy; the curvy backyard pool fed by a waterfall; the hot tub; the gazebo’. All these amenities were paid for with money stolen from Cumberland Packing. It’s unclear ...”

“... the strange customs of the natives and in particular how it is they manage to live in multi-storey buildings. Rather than denouncing racism or the social and economic conditions that sustain West Africa’s dependency even in the post-colonial world, Rouch prefers to celebrate the experiences common to all human beings. Some might find the studied ...”

“... as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child himself, hadn’t learned about these cross-currents by observation he could have paid more ...”

“... but most of his belongings are still in Skyline. He can see it from his new balcony, a seven-storey block faced in timber and what looks like red brick but is, in fact, cladding, backed by combustible insulation. It was built seventeen years ago. Invisible from the street is the unusual interior, a courtyard with a glass roof. The only way in and out of ...”

“... went to visit her at home a few weeks later. Her flat is one of ten in a plain, red-brick, three-storey block; five one-bedroom places on the ground floor and five two-bedroom flats on the upper storeys, one of which is Quinn’s. It was summer and red and white roses were blooming in the block’s communal gardens. Quinn showed me the fruit and vegetables ...”

“... March 1936. The authorities immediately made good on one of their promises by offering them a two-storey house on the Garden Ring Road: celebrity accommodation, comparable with the house Maxim Gorky had been given when he returned from Capri a few years earlier. But Prokofiev unexpectedly turned it down, giving the unsocialist explanation that ‘I can’t ...”

“... come close to falling down itself? No. The 150 mph winds had torn off the ceiling and half the top storey of her firm’s office and dislodged an awning which sailed across the street into the windows of the library opposite.The office had now been restored and it looked the same as it had before, but the library was still covered in Tyvek, as was the church ...”

“... was in existence long before the accepted date of its creation, 4004 BC. His colleague Mervyn Storey complained that the signs at the most popular tourist attraction in his North Antrim constituency, the Giant’s Causeway, misinformed the public by telling them that the rock formation was 550 million years old. Despite such stories it would be a great ...”

“... of the Met’ – but that was back in January 2009. We found the Travelodge in the eight-storey Axiom House, which forms an integral part of a shopping centre predictable in its Tesco, its timber cladding, its chain coffee stores – all the bubbling of the boom years, around which swirled the real local economy of pound shops, pubs and betting ...”

“... of a man facing a huge breathtaking vista of mountains, mist and sun, a version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Traveller above the Sea of Clouds. A closer look tells us that this man is engaged in painting the railing in front of him, and just now standing back to survey his handiwork. In several different countries, Cartier-Bresson will show two or ...”