“... his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s have now suspended credit card payments altogether.6 January, Yorkshire. Ring Mr Redhead, the coal-merchant at ...”

“... numbers of the damned will confine the victims, how the walls of this prison are four thousand miles thick, the stench intolerable, and, most famously, how eternity in hell can be imagined as a mountain of sand a million miles high, from which, every million years, a bird removes a single grain. Casey adds: Not a single ...”

“... to target. In Move Fast and Break Things, his polemic against the ‘digital-age robber barons’, Jonathan Taplin points to an analysis on Buzzfeed: ‘In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York ...”

“... would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said. The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army ...”

“... them to … look through the windows of Canary Wharf and spot canoodling office workers from eight miles away.’ Lotus-eaters of the Shard, drifting in the slow motion that seems to take effect forty or fifty floors above the agitated shuffle of London Bridge, are always on show. And they know it. As they stare out, trying to identify buildings or ...”

“... Taking advantage of the power of office is more common than not, as the modern morality tale of Jonathan Aitken reminds us. But Chinese corruption has been accompanied by dynamic growth, Indian by a liberalisation of the economy and the development of some highly advanced technology. In Russia, corruption chokes growth and the few efficient parts of the ...”

“... subsequent episode by the insatiable desire for network ratings. All this happened just a hundred miles from Dracula’s castle. Only in the Balkans. Although Vesna Goldsworthy does not investigate the Dynasty affair in Inventing Ruritania, it is a rich example of what she calls the ‘imperialism of the imagination’. The television producer who had wanted ...”

“... to the booth that once stood on the Aiken Mine Road in the Mojave Desert in California, about 15 miles from the nearest highway. It even earned a cameo in an episode of The X-Files. Technology’s far-flung outposts in the wilderness have fulfilled a variety of tasks, up to and including the reconfiguration of traditional communities by international ...”

“... to replace it when it breaks down – that is how most household machines are now made.In Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, Alfred Lambert, a retired railway engineer, sits in the cellar of his house, struggling with his advancing Parkinsonism and a string of Christmas lights. He is stuck somewhere between the culture of strategy three and ...”

“... entrance. Everyone on the train looked terribly prosperous, clean and peaceful as they read about Jonathan King and the Nias earthquake in the Standard. It is amazing to watch the skill with which three people can stand in a rocking train, in a space less than two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker ...”

“... to Zionism’s master code of Jewish exclusivism seems reduced to mere points on the map miles away from Palestine. Lebanon, the Soviet build-up, Syria, Druze and Shia militancy, the new American-Israeli quasi-treaty – these dominate the landscape, absorb political energies. Two anecdotes give a sense of the political and ideological problem I am ...”

“... but in the anglophone world the burden has fallen on a handful of loyal supporters, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Colin MacCabe, supplemented more recently by a new generation of admirers, such as Michael Temple and Michael Witt. In the last few years, happily, there seems to have been a revival of interest, perhaps because Godard has now achieved the ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”

“... he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. In 1841, he was chosen by the Census Commission to find out more ...”

“... its drop-in stadia, risen overnight from a wilderness of rail tracks and abandoned warehouses. Jonathan Liew, in a World Cup diary for the Observer, wrote about trying to reach a deserted park beside the ‘glittering’ ocean. It was a tempting retreat from the football action. To reach this oasis, he had to fight his way across a six-lane dual ...”