“... an aunt. Only when her mother married again, this time to a rightwing Chicago surgeon called Loyal Davis, was Nancy able to begin the climb out of her unsatisfactory origins. She dropped her real father and got Davis to adopt her. She began to lose her puppy fat. And she enrolled in Smith College – like all the so-called ...”

“... officer, gunner of the Caesar. In 1809 he was taken prisoner at the Basque Roads action. Joshua Davis was an earlier naval prisoner, an American who in 1778 was taken by the frigate Surprise aboard the Jason of Boston, a rebel privateer. He changed sides several times after his capture. He describes himself as ‘an American citizen who was pressed and ...”

“... musics. (After the war the ‘hillbilly’ Chet Baker ended up playing cool West Coast jazz, while Miles Davis huddled with Gil Evans and exulted in European melancholy.) Air travel became cheaper and more widely available, and Sinatra slipped easily into the role of poet laureate of the new global leisure; think of all those great songs celebrating ...”

“... the survivors of the East Indiaman Sydney, who reached those treacherous parts after four thousand miles of tropical seas in a longboat, possibly a record. In the wine-laden galliot which picked up the crew of the frigate Apollo, rank distinctions were observed: the 22 officers crowded for three days into the galliot’s cabin, where they ate, drank and slept ...”

“... the obelisk once stood.The MarshesIn earlier times, the Abbey of Montmajour, on a hill about five miles away from Arles, appeared to be an island, rising up out of the marshes (marécages) that surrounded it.The Mosquitoes of ArlesJohn Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France, the standard 19th-century guide, warns that Arles is unhealthy ‘at certain ...”

“... repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis. The show went well. Bogart, always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element ...”

“... journeys of the Irish abbot Saint Brendan; the later expeditions of Martin Frobisher, John Davis, Henry Hudson (who became a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard ...”

“... to one of the world’s most powerful glaciers, the Sermeq Kujalleq. Its cliff-like face is three miles wide and, counting its hidden underwater bulk, nearly a mile high. The bergs we saw were its children, calving off and then moving imperceptibly out into the ocean, to turn south in the current and then, diminishing and shedding their fresh water mass, to ...”

“... day, Woollan wrote, ‘there are nearly a million people lunching in restaurants within a few miles of the Strand.’ In the evenings, thousands dined in swanky West End restaurants, where a meal with wine might cost an average of a sovereign. But, as Woollan noted, ‘far more Londoners … live each day – and live not at all badly either – on a ...”

“... They included a gold star on the steps of the state capitol, to mark the spot where Jefferson Davis – the president of the Confederate States between 1861 and 1865 – was inaugurated and the slave nation was formed. There were no reminders of the city’s role as one of the most important centres of the Southern slave trade. In late 2013 the EJI ...”

“... yourself to your public in character and at your very best. As with his heroes James Brown and Miles Davis, it’s hard to picture Prince outside a certain rigorously maintained ‘look’. But in Garcia’s anecdote Prince’s touchiness about image feels less like showbiz corn and something closer to undiagnosed pathology. You have the impression of ...”

“... Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. Sliding down the electric window of the Chevrolet, to ...”

“... correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen Crane: A Study in ...”

“... what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village – and outside every village I passed through in Somaliland, the self-proclaimed but unrecognised state that comprises the northern part of Somalia – thousands of sheep and goats lay strewn in varying states of decay. The contents of ...”

“... in an epic struggle for the enemy’s capital. A century and a half later one can still see the miles of ramparts at Petersburg and Richmond; the crater blasted by Union miners in an attempt to breach Confederate defences is still there. Casualties of this final battle were more than 60,000. Jackson was right about the destructiveness. Whole libraries have ...”