“... in Franche-Comté, where the Peugeot family began making things for sale, starting with coffee mills and bicycles in the 19th century. While I waited for my contact outside the railway station, a freight train clanked past bearing a seemingly infinite number of new Peugeots. Here was France’s well-lubricated machine a-running, its state-planned network ...”

“... about this undoubtedly American poet. He is the justified sinner whom we meet in the fiction of James Hogg. And he is the superman, the Stavrogin, whom we meet in the fiction of Dostoevsky: the antinomian hero bent both on power and mischief and on the blessedness of the meek, so that he’s Prince Myshkin too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should ...”

“... women going weak at the knees in the presence of the ‘fiercely sexy’ Hughes, to borrow from a Mills and Boon-style account of him by Erica Jong, who only just managed to resist the ‘vampirish, warlock appeal’ of this ‘wildman-from-the-moors’: ‘He hulked,’ she recalls, and ‘reeked of virility … You could inhale the man’s pheromones across ...”

“... United States to a series of unsavoury autocrats and littered the world with unprofitable steel mills. Where​ land reform failed, it tended to be because it was not carried through in good faith. In Iran, for example, where the shah’s original good intentions were eroded by cronyism and corruption. India (not really covered here) is another instructive ...”

“... significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ...”

“... towns Matisse grew up in and the extravagant refinement of the fabrics which came from their mills; between the meanness of the places where he lived and the voluptuousness of the scraps of fabric he, even then, collected; between his toughness in sticking to the direction his instinct as a painter took him in and his embrace of subject-matter which ...”

“... gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the ...”

“... turned out to be an abortive attempt to raise an 11-ton section of the hull. The movie director James Cameron, fascinated with what he called the Everest of wrecks, filmed a dive that became part of his blockbuster 1997 movie (the footage was recently repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its ...”

“... gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use of coke for iron smelting in 1709, James Watt’s invention of the external-condenser steam engine in 1765, and the sinking of the first oil well by Elmer Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 – all of them, we might note, English-speaking businessmen. The three significant fossil fuels ...”

“... wilderness. Eagles, lairds, bagpipes and scones are the grist of Scotland’s Heritage mills – not little cogs, canny cooncil-men or the quangocracy manipulated from St Andrew’s House in such prodigious and democratically unaccountable numbers. At the literary level a similar puzzlement seems in order. What about the weird country depicted in ...”

“... spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was mostly waste.’ Quite so. It is ...”

“... a B-29 gunner shouldn’t get more of the feel of what happened to him into what he writes.’ James Dickey, who also served in the war, wrote: ‘Did Jarrell never love any person in the service with him? Did he just pity himself and all the Others in a kind of monstrous, abstract, complacent and inhuman Compassion?’ He criticised the tameness of ...”

“... off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic extremists). But almost the oddest response has been our terrified certainty that there remains a plentiful supply of suicide pilots and ...”

“... of blazer material from throughout New Zealand, used by Aunty Isy at the Ross and Glendinning Mills’.Frame’s​ career was now well established. There was a fellowship, then travel to Baltimore to visit Money, who had become a controversial sexologist. Over the course of many trips to the US, Frame would meet new friends, some of whom would serve as ...”

“... be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”