“... in the 1790s. What channels led to the public stage of science? What kinds of role did talented young men have to adopt? What rhetoric did they memorise, what masks did they sport in science’s version of Room at the Top? We get off on the wrong foot, Outram insists, if we accept the fashionable view that the scientific milieu created by the French ...”

“... frogs, the briar grows thicker and thicker round the rose. Sometimes the authority he claims is Robert Lowell’s: They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose. There are also poems – ‘On Not Being Milton’ and ‘The Rhubarbarians’ – in which, enjoying a bit of rough stuff, he plays the ...”

“... it was merely an appendix to the country, the future was in the hands of the thousands of bright young men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it ...”

“... offered but carping to his diary. Butlers are still more than a stage property and there are young men ‘in white waistcoats smoothing their sleek hair and pulling on their white gloves’. Not all is glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in ...”

“... the cosmopolitan striver-turned-mogul who was BP’s chief executive from 1995 until 2007, when a young ex-boyfriend sold the story of their relationship to the Mail on Sunday and Browne resigned. (He has since headed the Browne Review of higher education, which called for the lifting of the cap on tuition fees last October.) The organisation he inherited was ...”

“... Dash, started working on an act together. Harry was fascinated by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the godfather of modern magic, so when he and Dash put their tricks out to work, at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, they performed as the Houdini Brothers: with their thick black hair and swarthy complexions they didn’t ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him ...”

“... On the morning of 30 April 1865, Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy, head of the British Meteorological Department, slit his throat. Because Fitzroy had been the captain of the Beagle, which several decades earlier had carried the young Charles Darwin around the world to conduct the research that eventually bore fruit in On the Origin of Species (1859), and because he was a devout evangelical, some historians have chalked up his suicide to guilt over his unwitting complicity in the genesis of a scientific theory he detested ...”

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... information. As she remarks, things are always turning up: Otto Gross’s love letters to the young Frieda von Richthofen; evidence of Lawrence’s un-incandescent affair with Rosalind Baynes (extravagantly described by Maddox as ‘a return to endogamy’, ‘the choice of a deeply English woman, rather than a foreigner, as a love object’); above ...”

“... visits to 37 St Giles and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations ...”

“... than two hundred Party-linked or sympathetic periodicals. By far the most successful of these were Robert Blatchford’s Clarion and A.R. Orage’s New Age. The Clarion’s pitch was working-class and almost aggressively non-intellectual – entirely unlike anything Shaw or the Webbs might wish to emulate. If the early Statesman had a model, it was the ...”

“... myself’ – that is, bare her arms and upper bosom in public, like all those duchesses and young beauties, ‘at my age after being muffled up so many years!’ Mr C. was peremptory: ‘Eve he supposed had as much sense as I had and she wore no clothes at all!!!’ A white silk dress was duly ordered (Mr C. graciously agreed to pay) and arrived ...”

“... in the country. Labour in the city reached the zenith of its power during the mayoralty of Robert Wagner Jr (son of the senator who had drafted the New Deal measure recognising workers’ right to collective bargaining) between 1954 and 1966. Elected with strong labour support, Wagner extended the right to unionise to municipal workers, and presided ...”

“... break up as fast and dramatically as he thought it would in the 1970s. And he wishes now that the young Nairn hadn’t uttered that line for which he will probably be anthologised – about Scotland not being free until the last minister of the Kirk has been strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post. (As it turns out, the Post has done far less damage ...”