“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him to the ...”

“... romances, ‘the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’. Humberstall, who has to read the stuff, says resentfully: ‘Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either. I know. I had to read ‘em.’ But in the course of time, because the books are involved with the memory of the only class-free ...”

“... time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the dissidents met now and then to read their work and shout down the official festival. The group adopted the name Workers’ City – which spelled out their opposition to that recently developed area around Blackfriars and Ingram Street known as Merchant City – and set about picketing some ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... part of 18th-century European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns ...”

“... Stoic mistrust of the body, of instinct, of the irrational. Yet he was probably the most widely read and influential thinker of his time. Kings and cardinals queued and competed for his company. Philip II of Spain made him historiographer royal. Rubens, his devoted pupil, painted him as the modern Seneca; and it was through the medium of Lipsius’s edition ...”

“... that are subtly unfamiliar to the rest of the Western world.’ Any one who has tried to read the Colombian novel A Hundred Days of Solitude – popular as that mysteriously was in its English translation – must surely endorse Hough’s account of the difficulties that confront us, not much less with South American poems than with South or Central ...”

“... Another, more recent antecedent of which Salaman seems to be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is ...”

“... but was forcibly led away by his staff.‘In less time than a written account of it takes to read, the Battle of Culloden, or Drummossie Moor, was over … What followed for the rest of the afternoon would be unopposed, defenceless slaughter.’ The Jacobite dead and wounded on the battlefield are thought to have numbered between fifteen hundred and two ...”

“... of 14-year-old schoolboys, so fantastically improbable does its success still appear. It required Peter Taylor, a burly, buzz-cut ex-marine, to convince Japanese immigration officials that he was in Osaka to perform with the violinist Taro Hakase. It featured a wad of $10,000 yen tied in a hairband to ‘tip’ a departure gate official in Osaka. And it ...”

“... with little more than his genius and a recommendation for an apprenticeship with the portraitist Peter Lely.) For wealthy gentlemen like Boyle, the pursuit of natural knowledge might be open and generous, but for Hooke the limits to openness and civility were set by the fact that this was his way of making a living: he was one of the first entrepreneurial ...”

“... English was not very good, so we didn’t see much of the neighbours. Tante Biba and Onkel Peter, the friends from Istanbul, lived twenty or thirty miles away, and with them I spoke German. Then on to Bluefield, the ‘air-conditioned city’, where coal poured in from the bituminous fields. It was here that I started to learn English seriously. I ...”

“... is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and myths change with time. As the Lucan affair recedes to the horizon of living memory, revelations and theories once libellous are now printable, while first-hand recollections become clouded and the ...”

“... academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs more than any other book. Raymond Rivers, his biology teacher, stimulated his lifelong enthusiasm for reptiles and amphibians, which reached alarming levels when his bedroom ...”