“... 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 ...”

“... the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is putting on the paint,’ James Taylor, another conquest, explained. ‘It’s never straight on.’ Mitchell’s lyrical indirection, the habit of thinking against conventional tropes, is an extension of what she calls her ‘perverse need for originality’, a manifestation of a rebellious ...”

“... an inflamed imagination? And does she thereby violate the innocence of her charges, poor beautiful Miles and Flora? Or is the Governess a trustworthy witness to phenomena that a reader might expect to meet in the sort of ghost story where sceptical explanations are absent? Edmund Wilson advanced a version of the projective view, while F.R. Leavis – in the ...”

“... at school and was exiled (‘Dad didn’t believe in failure’) up to a smallholding twenty miles into the hills behind Perth where Somerville kept a smithy for weekend recreation. Somerville detested most aspects of the British Empire, but for Government House, the symbol of snobbery and privilege, he had a special contempt. Not till the very end of ...”

“... intimate relations with the other women in her life. One of these, the outspoken feminist Mary Taylor, emigrated to New Zealand, never married, and eventually published a polemical novel, Miss Miles, or A Tale of Yorkshire Life Sixty Years Ago (1890), whose evident kinship with Brontë’s Shirley prompts Gordon to ...”

“... In Evelyn’s own day, young trees were more usually shipped from Holland. I come from what D.J. Taylor has called the ‘pavement-pounding’ school of biography, perhaps particularly because buildings and landscape have been my preoccupation for so long. When I was researching my biography of John Soane I worked in his own house, which he had ensured (by ...”

“... work for him.’ Dr Johnson, an absentee from these pages, was urged by his rich friend John Taylor not to go to Streatham ‘or you must shoot a highwayman . . . I would rather be robbed than do that.’ Johnson replied: ‘But I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than afterwards swear against him at the Old ...”

“... have big 4x4s. The army press officers have a beat-up silver saloon car. They take us about twenty miles north to a chain of British army camps which have been set up east of the highway. The picknicking Kuwaitis and the Bedouin with their camels have been cleared out to make room. The highway is thick with British military traffic. While we are waiting at the ...”

“... it. I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth ...”

“... a year, was carried forward in church meeting after church meeting, in the exertion of walking for miles day after day and in the organisation of alternative rides, in the courageous endurance of arrests, bombings and harassments carried out in the name of the law. By criminalising not only blacks and whites who sat next to one another on buses but also the ...”

“... less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five miles through manufacturing and industrial towns and suburbs, places like Garfield, Lyndhurst, Kearny and Harrison, where it hooks east, then south again under the Pulaski Skyway and into Newark Bay. These are working towns, low-lying, all dirty brick and ...”

“... opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was ...”