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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.I thought about Dad up there among the clouds and hoped he was looking down. He could ...”

“... my position: I was raised on trashy books. I grew up in rural Kansas; the nearest library was 20 miles away, and, especially in the summer, the only books around were my stepmother’s and the ones my older sister had procured through school catalogues. At my high school, Daphne du Maurier was on the English department reading list, along with ...”

“... reduced me to sudden tears.) I began absorbing ever more specialised fare: Macdonald’s books, Taylor and Tuchman on the political background, battle histories of Gallipoli, Verdun and Passchendaele, books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on disgust, observes ‘that misguided collection of misfits known as The Queers’ assembling after dusk (they sound like a band from a couple of decades ...”

“... on the dominance of the big seven private housebuilding companies – in descending order of size, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Homes, Persimmon, Bellway, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson – who between them have almost 40 per cent of the market in new homes. But the most striking thing in the document is a chart displaying the history of Britain, in housebuilding ...”

“... that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr Timothy Cruso, Mr Hannot of Yarmouth, Mr Nathaniel Taylor, Mr Owen and several others; and of another kind, poets Sam. Wesley, Daniel De Foe, and two or three of your Western martyrs that, had they liv’d, would have been extraordinary men of that kind, viz. Kitt. Battersby, young Jenkins, Hewlin, and many ...”