“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...”

“... organised according to a highly divided system of labour with massively discrepant rewards. We read of the man who loved his pet fish, and talked to them, but learn nothing about his job. And when the victim was an investment banker, we hear mostly about how much he loved to sail. There is the firefighter who loved to cook, the claims adjuster who fed ...”

“... I hated it! Or . . . Delicatessen. I couldn’t stand it . . . And I feel the same way about Peter Greenaway’s films . . . Yet I still get compared to these directors now and then.’ In the introduction to Trier on von Trier, Stig Björkman makes it clear where he places von Trier: ‘His development . . . is as daring as it is astonishing,’ he ...”

“... problem, but it soon got markedly worse. She was depressive, like Brown, with whom she drank, read poetry, kissed, drank more; apart, they wrote each other passionate letters. They became engaged, and were to set up in married life on Orkney, but Brown was unable to consummate the relationship. They parted. They wrote to each other – many, many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the practice of connecting literature and healthcare by encouraging people to read books to improve their well-being’. She points out that almost a century earlier, Schauffler dedicated The Poetry Cure to ‘the noble army of CREATIVE LIBRARIANS, PRACTITIONERS ALL … OF THE POETRY CURE’. Drawing on recent work by Leah Price, Bucknell ...”

“... Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But (1989), Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). He captures to vivid effect the distinctive lyrical anguish filmmakers like Jennings and Shepitko bring to their portrayal of the damage that war does to people and places; and, like any good historian, he has a ...”

“... In looks, this Odyssey is often reminiscent of other 21st-century screen ‘epics’, not least Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The visit to the Land of the Dead reminded me of the excursions beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones. At the end of the film, which draws heavily on Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’, a character sets out to ‘sail beyond ...”

“... flats was being torn down on the Old Kent Road. I studied old photographs of Avondale Square and read through online chats where people remembered their childhood friends. I went to the former location of men’s clothing shops, now pound shops; someone said the real Ronnie’s family might have run businesses there. Nobody asked me why I was curious about ...”

“... looking.’ Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ on the eve of the Spartacist uprising. We read it now with knowledge of the uprising’s brutal outcome, but we can still register Luxemburg’s passionate endorsement of the energy and potential of the people. She is talking about aliveness – what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons recently described ...”

“... people who ask the right questions. The waiter replied, politely and in perfect English: ‘We can read your newspapers and watch your television; we hear what your politicians and your journalists say about us.’ That summed it up: all this time we Brits thought we were talking to ourselves, and we were, but everyone else was listening in. Belgians are not ...”