“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that at the time she said she was putting the bomb in a coach at Manchester she had been many miles away in Chipping Norton. Lots of witnesses saw her there. Obviously her story had been wrong, but the budding Inspector Morses from Thames Valley were not put off. They went to Risley Remand Centre (‘grisly Risley’, as everyone there called it) to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”