“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but, Griffin notes, often had to abstain for no better reason than that the nearest pub was three miles away.We know that the 19th century was an era of rampant economic growth, rapid urbanisation and rising urban industrial wages. But Griffin concludes that ‘something less positive was hiding in its slipstream: a sharp uptick in inequality between the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fairness and I saw the law as a tool that can help make things fair’); and, of course, Aretha, Miles and Coltrane on the stereo.The convention leaned heavily on biography and family, a mix of relatability, struggle and aspiration. It had the feeling of a party thrown for the departing grandparents by the aunts and uncles, with an audience of cheering ...”

“... longue while Frost typed. There was something glossy and irreal about Twin Peaks, the town ‘five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale ...”

“... a Hobart newspaper claimed in 1825. Such avowals of British identity and loyalty thousands of miles from London were also a way of making claims on its attention. Settlers remained for a long time heavily dependent on British capital subventions and military hardware, and successive governments poured very large sums into emigration schemes and colonial ...”

“... if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and streamlining and, in the north, in ...”

“... too much’) and travels beyond the city walls to the Protestant cemetery, where her friend Martha Taylor is buried, and continues on through ‘valleys, farms and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the ...”

“... defending the American colonists in their struggle not to be taxed by a Parliament three thousand miles away, not simply because there must be no taxation without representation and it would be absurd to send American MPs to Westminster, but also because the colonists had grown away from their mother country, grown too ‘Whiggish’ for their internal ...”

“... into the distance. I’d booked a room at an inn in the Amana Colonies, a farming community twenty miles from Iowa City, founded by refugee German Pietists in the mid-1800s. The owner had told me they were having a bonfire for guests that night and I had visions of high-minded talk among kindred spirits drawn to the rich history of American utopianism.What ...”

“... from the Greek had been in prose, by the celebrated Yang Xianyi, who with his wife, Gladys Taylor, translated many Chinese classics into English as he lived through the hellish vicissitudes of China from 1940 till his death in 2009, including his and his wife’s separate imprisonment. Wong and Niansheng, who also translated ...”

“... dashed. We sat in his living room, Grimshaw hunched forward amiably on a low-slung sofa, knees miles ahead of him. He wears an electronic tag on his ankle that sends a signal to the authorities if he drinks alcohol. He’s not actually a drinker, he says, but before the crime that got him put away for a long stretch – he severely battered an acquaintance ...”

“... account – some ‘busted’ vertebrae. He was driven by his wife Sara to Middletown, some fifty miles away, where he was treated by a doctor they knew, Ed Thaler, and spent the next few weeks recuperating in an attic bedroom of Thaler’s house. The news leaked out patchily. A two-sentence report in the New York Times of 2 August – headlined ‘Dylan Hurt ...”

“... hard to give people back their water.’ The Severn is Britain’s longest river. It stretches 220 miles from its source in the Welsh hills. When the river makes trouble for Tewkesbury, it begins there, far to the north-west, with downpours that take days to swell the Severn downstream. There’s time to act, and usually there’s no need; the river bloats out ...”