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“... French by the Treaties of Paris (1814 and 1815). The captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, was, in Jonathan Miles’s words, ‘a rusty relic from the Ancien Régime who had not put to sea for about a quarter of a century’. When it ran aground, the Medusa had become separated from the rest of the expedition. There wasn’t enough room in its longboats ...”

“... monument – which is perfectly pitched, moving and vast. Without that vastness, legible from miles away, the structure’s emotional charge (or ability to trick) would be mitigated. There is, in public or collective monuments, just as there is in religious buildings, a truistic equation between size and contemplative efficacy, between size and the ...”

“... the ruins of this little-known venture, even if he has overlooked the remaining reservoir five miles south-east of Salisbury at a thickly wooded place of knee-deep leafmeal and perpetual dusk called Pope’s Bottom. It is now a coarse fishery which abuts the estate of Clarendon Park. The omission of this great house from the first edition was ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1801 a young man called Hans Jonathan left the mansion in Copenhagen where he worked as a slave. Going for a walk was allowed: despite his status, he had a degree of autonomy within the walls of the city, then a thriving port with around one hundred thousand inhabitants. But this time he didn’t return ...”

“... Anzio​ is about 120 nautical miles from Salerno, on the west coast of Italy, and in January 1944 a convoy of 374 Allied ships took 25 hours to get there, at an average speed of barely five knots. They crawled towards their destination, trying to make as little giveaway whitewater wake as possible, and allowing for the blunt, roll-on, roll-off bows of so many of their number ...”

“... the resort island of Chincoteague in Virginia, to an inconclusive but foreboding ending set a few miles from Basra, during the Iraq invasion of March 2003. True to its thriller form, the book is, as I found to my cost close to 4 a.m. one morning, damnably hard to put down. Meek is a terrific describer: he can bring a landscape to life on the page with two or ...”

“... The Catchprices live in Franklin, New South Wales, which used to be a country town twenty miles from Sydney: since then Sydney has swollen out of recognition (it’s now the second biggest city in the world, after Calcutta), and suddenly Franklin finds itself only two miles along the F4 from the outermost ...”

“... Are we all bare-faced liars?’ The question came from Jonathan Aitken, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, in January 1994. It was put to the then editor of the Guardian, Peter Preston. The words ‘we all’ referred to Aitken himself, his wife Lolicia and his faithful Arab friend Said Ayas. The answer to the question was ‘yes ...”

“... long road to nation-building. Kazakhstan was the last of the 15 republics to declare independence. Jonathan Aitken is an unlikely candidate to write a book on this subject. Since emerging from prison after his conviction for perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special ...”

“... as to be next to useless. Niedecker spent nearly all of her life on Black Hawk Island, three miles from Fort Atkinson, a town in the rich dairy country of south-central Wisconsin with a population of around eight thousand. The state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 ...”

“... of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on ...”

“... petrol coupons, we’d drive to Granny’s house in Sheringham, a long ride of nearly twenty miles. The narrow, twisting road ran past Little Snoring and on to Holt, where we often stopped to break the journey and look in shop windows. Then, from a wooded ridge, the land below us was rimmed with the mysterious sea. Here my mother switched the engine off ...”

“... stay on in Aldbourne. He had been invited to a formal dinner dance at a flash hotel in Newbury, 15 miles from the village. The party was to celebrate the engagement between my mother’s brother, Peter Sandison, and Connie Major, both in their final year at Birmingham University. My Uncle Peter, as he would become, was due to join the Royal Navy as a ...”

“... at 100,000 livres, it had a top speed of some 70 mph and could cover anything up to eight hundred miles a day. Finding no customers, Desforges himself took a machine to the top of the Tour Guinette and was launched by four tough peasants. He plummeted directly to the ground. And so it was with all the early birdmen. Cautious spirits, like Leonardo da ...”

“... Parkinson’s disease, in Ivan Vaughan’s book, becomes a fascinating, even thrilling experience. Jonathan Miller talks in his introduction of Ivan ‘surmounting his disease by regarding it as a treasured possession and not just as an abominable affliction’, and that is exactly right. The experience of the disease becomes a voyage of discovery – about ...”