“... in the post-Boxer period, throwing up such cultural tephra as Fu Manchu, and the ‘Chinese’ burn beloved of primary school playgrounds. But, as the authors point out, lingchi is not obviously grislier than familiar European practices such as the thumbscrew, the fustuarium, breaking on the wheel, garrotting, the rack, racial lynch mobs, autos-da-fé, or ...”

“... dye.’ Watson’s version is sleeker, and closer to the original: ‘in summer freeze, in winter burn like fire.’ The English craze for Petrarch began to take hold in the 1530s, at the court of Henry VIII, where Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Wyatt were the ‘two chieftans’ of a ‘new company of courtly makers’. They had, the Elizabethan ...”

“... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...”

“... he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer regarded by many as the American ...”

“... were 17N’s principal targets, for supporting the Nato bombing of Serbia. Curiously enough, as Michael Llewellyn Smith, a former British ambassador, reports in Athens: A Cultural and Literary History, the young Blair, on a student holiday in 1974, had witnessed the triumphant return of the exiled Constantine Karamanlis after the fall of the ...”

“... years’.The government was determined to extract an apology from the men. The attorney general, Michael Havers, was sent to Walton to persuade them. Havers went from cell to cell, trying to talk to each man separately, promising early release. He then addressed them in the prison chapel. All they had to do was say sorry. If they did, they could leave that ...”

“... rare sight in Britain before the railways. Suddenly they were everywhere. Writing in the 1960s, Michael Robbins said: ‘The Victorians who created the railway look like a race imbued with some demonic energy.’ In the prologue to Railways and the Victorian Imagination (1999), Michael Freeman prints three maps of the ...”

“... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...”

“... used the fireplace as a tool. He would walk around the table, gather sensitive papers, and burn them at the end of meetings. The fire is now blocked. The only other tool, the clock, did not work when I was last there. Over a century, the physical space in which politicians make decisions … has deteriorated.’What is a tech visionary? Bret ...”

“... his head – ‘La, Sir! You’re always fancying things.’ One of the book’s recent champions, Michael Neve, finds it a ‘subtle meditation on the philosophical ludicrousness of love’, a ‘picture of driven desire that, with Freudian exactness, ends up without even an obscure object’. All the while Hazlitt continued his punishing schedule of literary ...”

“... it theirs. ‘The first time I met Rosemary she was with the Shankhill Help,’ said Wilson Free-burn, with a mug of tea in front of him. ‘It was 12 years ago and we had no money and I was involved in community relations and she was trying to give Citizens Advice.’ He stared into the Formica. ‘She had sparkle you know – and she never charged those ...”

“... the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, made the ecoterrorist a pop cultural staple. The nadir was Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004), in which a group of eco-extremists fake climate disasters for political ends. Crichton appended various denialist tracts to the text, though its paranoid reading of climate politics was a few years ahead of the ...”

“... would later tell people that Lytton Strachey was wrong to say that Brooke had ‘bandy legs’; in Michael Holroyd’s biography James sides with his brother: ‘Rupert had bandy legs, all the same.’) This was, as Delany writes, the high summer of Neo-Paganism: Brooke read Paradise Lost to his admirers high in a chestnut tree; canoed down the river at ...”

“... and emphasis. The delivery was crafted to move like natural speech, with a leavening of slow-burn humour. This was a country-smart poetry, beautifully balanced between frontier transcendentalism and the long gaze of Asia. A week on the road is enough to confirm my instinct that this western strip, all the way down from Canada to Mexico, with its climatic ...”

“... above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it, and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious smell, a capacity to cause conflagrations, and a deadly impact. Nature kindly put a huge amount of the earth’s carbon underground, and we have for the past 200 years been putting it ...”