“... hundreds of heavily armed and armoured men lunged at each other on horseback over several square miles. Excited horses ridden by excited people who know how to do it well and enjoy it are terrifying if you are standing in the way. Kings were nervous of the unpredictable political consequences of tournaments, and the Church was decidedly unhappy about the ...”

“... Americans against German cities. Americans come last chronologically, and also in intent, for as Richard Overy explains succinctly and well, the US saw the bombing of cities as a last resort and not the very first aim, as it was for Bomber Command. However, from Appendix 2 of the Hamburg police president’s report, which isn’t reproduced in the official ...”

“... from the age of 18 you will, on average, be 700,000 years old before you win the jackpot, and if Richard Branson succeeds in his bid for the People’s Lottery you’re more likely to be a million. The newsagent in question is on Willesden High Road, where every shop that isn’t a newsagent is a takeaway. The streets of low-rise housing go on for ever and ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... is the progress of research on what are known as ‘norms of reaction’. The German biologist Richard Woltereck advanced the idea in 1909, based on his experiments on the water flea Daphnia. He noted that different varieties of a species might, when exposed to environmental changes, react in a range of ways. Some varieties might hardly change; others ...”

“... turned her back on it. She might as well have spent the decade in her hammock, eight thousand miles away. The fact is that Thatcherism is beset with its own internal contradictions over Europe, yet it is part of Thatcher’s magnificent run of luck to have escaped this dilemma for so long. The Government was able to square the circle in its early years by ...”

“... was to side with newness, the strategy favoured by the Futurists, Egoists and Vorticists: Pound, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, Hilda Doolittle. Pound ‘took on’ technology: ‘what the analytical geometer does for space and form’ he compared to what ‘the poet does for the states of consciousness’; ‘as the abstract mathematician ...”

“... use for several thousand years, it is now a buoyed and lighted marine freeway, a thousand miles long’, sometimes as narrow as a modest river, sometimes open ocean. Bits of it sound like hell for a small craft; Raban both fears and relishes ‘the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal ...”

“... was in the hands of New College, Oxford, and they do not appear to have patronised reformers. Richard White, vicar in 1561, was called to the church courts for the erroneous belief ‘that men had free will to do good and bad,’ and William Lambert, vicar from 1574 to 1592, used holy water in baptism freely, and preached rarely. Much of the work of ...”

“... we might well have thought they were nothing but ghosts ... Except that the music kept on for miles later ... Dumbstruck, we watched them march down the track to town, their outlandish figures getting smaller and smaller. ‘Dumbstruck’ is an adjective that suits Nicholas, one he would choose. Paralysis is his mode, and there is a corresponding ...”

“... the Broken Column built in the final years of the Ancien Régime at the Désert de Retz, a few miles west of Paris. A four-storey folly, set on a rise, with a jagged, torn roofline and deep fissures scoring its fluted walls, it was admired by visitors such as Thomas Jefferson but quickly became overgrown and yet more ruinous (though it was still ...”

“... poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting a picture herself. Often they would create scenes together. An actress as well as a painter, Nivison would provide props and ...”

“... and the university; about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed ...”

“... a product that must be painstakingly grown and chemically processed, then transported thousands of miles; they rely on relationships built up over years and put millions of dollars at stake with every shipment. But scammers don’t need farmers or dockworkers or the crew of cargo ships. No physical objects have to be moved. Cash comes to them. In the case of ...”

“... wrote about what he could see through his first-floor window: the three protruding masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that ran aground and broke in two in August 1944, a mile and a half off Sheerness beach. The ship was carrying 1400 tonnes of explosives – enough to wipe Sheerness off the map, along with Southend and parts of the ...”