“... that China’s coal burning will peak in the next two years. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Nicholas Stern, who wrote a report on the economics of climate change for the British government in 2007, reckons the world would do well to take China at its word. ‘Smart investors can already see that most fossil fuel reserves are essentially ...”

“... from the sand, the way they had watched their mothers glean loose sheaves from the fields. Thomas Peck, a labourer, gathered around twelve pounds of raisins, ‘which he did put into the sleeves of his coat and carry home with him’. The wife of Henry Harvest found only half that number, with ‘a great deal of gravel and sand amongst them’. The ...”

“... In the Cathedral at Christ Church in Oxford, between the recumbent knight with the false nose and the tomb of Saint Frideswide, who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself ...”

“... affects the biographies, a good case in point being provided by that very active Parliament-man, Thomas Norton. Now known to have been one of the Privy Council’s most active managers in the House, he was typed by Neale as a leader of the Puritan opposition. His biographer still reads him in Neale’s way, so that some reasonably transparent official ...”

“... filmmakers. The novelist Cesare Pavese went so far as to compare De Sica, perhaps ironically, with Thomas Mann, as the author of a national narrative. Had movies superseded literature? The Futurists thought so, proposing in one 1916 manifesto a cinema that would ‘co-operate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and ...”

“... painted water-colours which he then gave, as it they were musical scores, to his composer friend, Thomas von Hartmann, who selected one and, so to speak, played it. Then a third friend, the dancer, Alexander Sacharoff, joined them and improvised a dance to the music, concluding by pointing to that painting which he felt best expressed what he had just ...”

“... using free indirect style to drop into their points of view for a paragraph or section. Here are Nicholas Pratt, Kitty Harrow, David Windfall, Johnny Hall (Patrick’s old friend and fellow druggie) and, crowningly, Princess Margaret, who makes a cameo appearance at the party. It is a very funny book, and part of the comedy is cumulative: over the course of ...”

“... for Protestants to see Jane as the best legitimate heir. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, openly and precisely said that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards. Mary’s remarkable initial success came from single-mindedly stressing the one asset she ...”

“... its international scope. He was often abroad himself, scouting European talent (he brought Thomas Mann’s work to America, and made sure that Burke cut the ‘the’ from the title of his translation of Death in Venice), even as he micro-managed the Dial by means of copious, detailed correspondence. Occasionally, his fastidiousness could seem ...”

“... and could hope to survive only if it was reformed from top to bottom. As early as 1833, Tsar Nicholas I diagnosed Turkey to Metternich as ‘the sick man’ (he doesn’t seem to have added ‘of Europe’). And the idea of stirring the Muslims into action on behalf of British interests had already occurred to enterprising British proconsuls such as ...”

“... against science as a springboard for it. In England, reputed ‘conjurors’ like John Dee, Thomas Hariot, William Warner and Robert Fludd were engaged in important transitional research in such areas as engineering, optics, cartography, pharmacy and metallurgy. They were early technologists, though still working within an animistic, non-scientific ...”

“... that the leopard Dante meets in Canto 1 is in an allegory of lechery, for instance, or that it’s Nicholas III (whom Dante does not dignify by naming) whose flaming feet stick out of the stone in Inferno 19. But every so often one of the wires comes loose and James adds something that would have been better left out. Just occasionally he’s downright ...”

“... keeping both convention and character at bay, leaving these threatening things to those who, like Thomas and Anna Quayne, Portia’s stepbrother and sister, have succumbed in the coldly defeated world of being themselves. To be young is to have none of the story – the stigmata – by which the adults are inexorably ‘placed’. For his elders, the amoral ...”

“... he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all ...”

“... writers. Fortunately, he discovered in himself another talent, and under the pen-name of ‘Nicholas Blake’ published a series of commercially successful detective stories, the classic genteel-class literary genre of the interwar period. At this point, Day-Lewis seemed even more of a whole-hogger for ‘the Revolution’ than Auden and Spender ...”