“... hear his voice on the soundtrack telling the story. Joe Pesci’s voice we must be hearing, like William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard, through special communication arrangements made with another kind of underworld. De Niro appears again in Heat, looking the same, talking tough, but mainly not talking much, and his suits are not nearly so flashy. This time ...”

“... a kind of wilful but malleable presence in the background of the political process, riding out to hunt or joust while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory accounts of diplomats, who always believe they are closer to the workings of power than they really are – has been vigorously ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”

“... myth and nightmare – malevolent elves and fairies, wodewoses, and followers of the fearful Wild Hunt. To read Shakespeare properly, Barton makes us see, we need to reinhabit the forests of his imagination, to repopulate them with the fancies, wonders and terrors that made them such a powerful poetic resource. To take refuge in the forest, outside the ...”

“... Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered everything from a flea circus to a waxworks display under one roof. Books had their place along ...”

“... Milk. The authenticity of Florence’s spiritual powers was vouched for by a Victorian scientist, William Crookes, who also became besotted with ‘Katie King’, the spirit whose materialisations were the high point of Florence Cook’s séances. There was no middle ground in the 19th-century Spiritualist debate. Either the voice you heard and the form you ...”

“... mood for what’s to come, not the stuff about the late-night tattoo sessions and the three-week hunt for Mr Hashish, the Afghan border guard who stole your US Army fatigue jacket with the ‘vitamins’ sewn into the lining. Those stories are probably best kept under wraps, at least until you die, or until I can use them to fulfil the ransom demands when ...”

“... worth laying down one’s life for two brothers or four cousins. This insight was formalised by William Hamilton in Oxford in the Sixties under the name of ‘kin selection’. If seemingly self-sacrificial behaviour disproportionately benefits one’s genetic kin, it once again becomes worthwhile in narrow genetic terms. In Wilson’s hands, Hamilton’s ...”

“... the Greeks? Aristotle said the ictis dined on honey, so Buffon asked Le Roy, the inspector of the hunt at Versailles, to experiment on the King’s ferrets; no, they did not like honey, and an ermine that Buffon fed a honey diet soon went the way of the swallows. It was the armadillo that epitomised Buffon’s difficulty with classification. Armadillos are ...”

“... joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth.’‘I’m sorry: the twelfth ...”

“... wall paintings from the catacombs along with much later paintings, not only Zurburán but Holman Hunt. Roman coins are placed in the same tradition, the same gallery, as Philip Webb’s beautiful William Morris-inspired Cross of 1897. Other sections on ‘The Dual Nature’ and ‘The True Likeness’ offer similar ...”

“... Modern classicists have tended to focus on the Amazons in myth, as the subtitle of a 1984 book by William Blake Tyrrell – Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking – attests. But the balance had begun to swing back towards ethnography before Tyrrell’s work appeared. In the 1960s, archaeologists excavating the many kurgans, or burial mounds, that dot the ...”

“... males can rewrite a life. Schreiner gets into the DNB as an appendix to her lawyer brother William. William is not mentioned in the Companion entry, even as an appendix. The Companion is careful to note that Olive’s mother, ‘a brilliant, exacting Englishwoman’, ‘once beat her for using an Afrikaans ...”

“... devised by men, and spurious in its concern for women.’ Among Place’s contemporaries, only William Cobbett disagreed with him, believing that the change was no more than ‘modesty in the word and grossness in the thought’, as proven by the growing number of prostitutes who ‘now swarm in our towns’, and by a rise in illegitimate births. Mason ...”

“... in turn, are helped by Ella Grogan, the daughter of a local midwife and a gardener’s boy, William. All the characters in this hierarchy gain some narrative attention, but mainly it plays over the old man and the Paxtons’ daughter Alice. Between them, these two mark off a momentous span of English historical time. Alice is born on the eve of Eden’s ...”