“... space is there really between a Greer book about her father and the next slab of, say, Maclaine or Taylor, Going Public on some hitherto neglected item of spiritual or carnal adventure? Less, it seems at times, than one might have hoped. Not so much because of the writer’s freedom to fly round the globe repeatedly and drive rented cars across continents: it ...”

“... to be found, for example, in the brilliant work of Norman Davies’s own tutor at Oxford, A.J.P. Taylor, or give the reader the same tiresome sense that he is being got at in ways he cannot contest. Instead, the record of two millennia and more is bound together by an important and forgotten thesis. Celtic history, together with the sometimes over-copious ...”

“... place. Apart from minor errors and one big one – diminishing SOE’s chief of staff, George Taylor, to the lowly rank of liaison officer – McLynn has written with a sound and temperate understanding of the issues then in play. Someone was required, once contact with the Partisans was firmly made, who would bring the eye of diplomatic and political ...”

“... student, though neither would be able to remember exactly where. He was born in Płock, fifty miles west of Warsaw, and over the course of the First World War the family followed his father, a doctor, as the front shifted: Warsaw, Vilnius, St Petersburg, then west again back to Płock. Arriving in the family home he had left four years earlier, Stefan ...”

“... points out, are now porous and interpenetrative. The Moroccan anti-Polisario berm intrudes several miles into Mauritanian territory. Reliant on a more or less arbitrary principle to divide the worlds of citizen and alien, the metropolis is always hard put to impose its will across the whole imperium. This is as true of Angevin or Bourbon sovereigns as of the ...”

“... Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). Contrary to what Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor argue in The Politics of Utopia (1982), Friedrich Hayek’s ‘catallaxy’ or ‘spontaneous order’ is also a kind of utopia: one that dispenses even with the need for planning that the utopian socialists foresaw, or the absence of sin on which, per ...”

“... was irresistible, but a parliamentary motion to that effect was defeated. What to do next? Helen Taylor refused to allow men to join the council of the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Bodichon resigned from it, thinking that this attitude would delay victory by at least ten years.Her upbringing and wealth had released her from ...”

“... and he put a ship’s bell in the garden. (The original lighthouse was built by his uncle Alan, 12 miles south-west of Tiree.) Fanny put benches here and there, so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in ...”

“... from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the Salieri Express for Budapest, then chuffs on to Milan, from where it cruises to a luxurious island on Lake Como, then to Lausanne. A brief interlude on Lake Geneva is ...”

“... confront the problem of white working-class racism. In one of the essays edited by Michael Harloe, Miles and Phizacklea report on their research at Willesden. Although not strictly part of London’s ‘inner city’ as geographers would define it, it is nevertheless an urban area, suffering from the wider economic processes of capitalist decline. This ...”

“... each year the modest government grant to the Catholic seminary of St Patrick’s, Maynooth, a few miles from Dublin. Why should Gladstone so violently object to the 1838 renewal? Why did he change his mind and vote for renewal in 1842? Why, above all, having caved in, did he then resign on the matter in 1845? Worldly men were baffled at the time, and worldly ...”

“... Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay controlled around a million square miles of territory in British North America, with trading rights that extended to the Pacific. It persuaded Indigenous trappers to swap beaver pelts for firearms and tobacco, drawing them into transatlantic capitalism. In the first two-thirds of the 18th century ...”

“... of all single parents. Once, in the car with her, ‘she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both.’ She lost a nursing job after she rollerbladed through the hospital emergency room, high on painkillers. Vance likes to connect his mother’s drug problem to US immigration ...”

“... one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is reported as ...”

“... stayed on the surface, initially, working in the coal-screening plant at Woolley Colliery, a few miles from his home: You couldn’t see more than two yards for dust and the noise was so intense you had to speak with your hands. I had to scrape the caked dust from my lips before I could eat my sandwiches ... I saw men with one arm and one leg, men crippled ...”