“... down the ranks. Muir has countless examples of young men watching their own stock fall. William Jones, curate of the parish of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, got by on £60 a year and considered himself worse off than ‘a bricklayer’s labourer or the turner of a razor grinder’s wheel’; Basil Hall, the son of ...”

“... Coast and Europe descended on the town of Rawlins, fifty miles north of the Colorado state line. James Craig Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, and Simon Newcomb, from the Naval Observatory in Washington, were among those hoping to catch a first definitive glimpse of Vulcan, though others had other purposes: Thomas Edison wanted to test one ...”

“... The president​ in question is Jonathan Lincoln Duncan. He’s a Gulf veteran and former prisoner of war, an Army Ranger who was tortured in Iraq but didn’t betray his comrades or his country. He’s also a former governor of North Carolina, the state he was born in and where he was brought up by his single mother. He married his law school sweetheart (called, bizarrely, Rachel Carson), and they had one child, a daughter ...”

“... about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro and half-Cherokee, the New York City ...”

“... old verses (after all, he reminded me, Arabs have produced good translations of Dylan Thomas and James Joyce) and was put out when I rejected them and gave him the new simplistic piece: but I was determined to ‘make my position clear’, so that no one thought me to represent some devious British foreign policy (if such there be) connected with the Gulf ...”

“... ill to hold the pen himself and dictated it to be typed and signed by his secretary at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull. He told Amis he was going into hospital that day for more tests – ‘only tests, but of course they are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it.’ Still, he tried not to sound too downcast. ‘Don’t get ...”

“... sphygmomanometers that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first ...”

“... private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found the task difficult, as well he might. In 1865, James wrote of his father: He had but little individual attachment. Liked people’s company; – they liked his (when he was ...”

“... mere hysterical wisps alongside the sunny central story, masterfully controlled, of the delightful Jones and Iqbal families. The Autograph Man is, as it were, a novel made entirely of those wisps. Its central character, Alex-Li Tandem, is a dreary blank, an empty centre entirely filled by his pop-culture devotions. Around him swirls a text incapable of ever ...”

“... an old plot device. Pamela complains about the important letter to her mother that is stolen; Tom Jones has to leave home because the letter that contains the secret of his birth is misdirected; Tess writes a letter of confession to Angel Clare, but it slips beneath the carpet and is never delivered. Letters have been an uncertain way to communicate in ...”

“... scholar would undertake such an edition. Nor is there any consensus on the quality of his poems; James VI, in his youth, termed him ‘maister poete’ and ‘prince of poets’, and some modern critics adopt these terms with enthusiasm – indeed, Helena Shire calls him an ‘arch-poet’. (I suppose that if one has to use a periphrasis, ‘the maister ...”

“... along with furniture, household goods and ‘table glass of extreme beauty’, according to Burne-Jones’s son-in-law, J.W. Mackail, in his life of Morris. In other words, he was always a designer as well as an architect. Yet design was a term he hated, because it consecrated the divorce between the imagining of things and their making. So long as that ...”

“... admired as a great prophet, and whose work is quite unreadable today); the ‘manifestly insane’ Jones Very (who considered himself the ‘new born bard of the Holy Ghost’, and who went around baptising people until he made the ‘tactical error’ of trying to baptise several Salem ministers who promptly had him put in an asylum for a month); and Henry ...”

“... changed Abuses to Uses and removed his quotation from ‘the sex-and-violence literature’ of James Hadley Chase and Ian Fleming: he substituted writing of his own, not guying these offensive writers, but carefully imitating them, in pastiches which few recognised to be imitation – since Hoggart’s point was, partly, that such writers have power and ...”

“... Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking in the magical St Ebbes quarter (recently flattened by commercial interests), playing dominoes with little ...”