“... to pieces. Many items show signs of wear, indicating that they were in use for a long time, and may have been family heirlooms, but there are also tong marks, indicating that pommels were wrenched off forcibly. Clear incisions on some of the pieces suggest that there was no great time gap between the disassembly and the burial, and it’s unlikely that ...”

“... Though he usually couldn’t cure, a physician could take good care, and a 20th-century reader may envy all the extended house-calls described here and the assiduous vigilance at the bedside – not to mention, in the earlier decades at least, the generous use of opium. (Fears of working-class addiction led to severe restrictions on the drug later ...”

“... and his throat had been cut. The body was discovered at 7 p.m. on 28 April; the autopsy was on 1 May. A week later samples and data were Fedexed to Goff’s Hawaii home – crime scene photos, insects from the body, soil samples and local weather information. On 14 May, he phoned in his final conclusions: the victim had ...”

“... the same, Shakespeare, for instance, can’t have known anything at all about Norse myth. Hamlet may, as O’Donoghue claims, go back to the story of Frodi’s mill and the giantess-slaves who grind at a magic stone there, as told in one of the few Eddic poems outside the bishop’s Codex Regius, and Hamlet’s feigned madness ...”

“... whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’ The tract before the court, he went on, ‘would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character’. Here, couched in Victorian prose, was the erection ...”

“... As a result, any biography of Wells is bound to have a lot to say about sex. His sexual career may have started slowly enough, but once he got going he bonked for England – numerous long affairs supplemented by even more numerous casual liaisons. He liked intelligent women and was attentive to them, he flirted readily, he was fun, and latterly he had a ...”

“... The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public attention. The excitement stems not from decoding the genome of ...”

“... sometimes merely wrapping in oratory some not particularly compelling observations – ‘the city may be defined, then, as that place where people come to buy and sell’ – and the book is perhaps best read out of sequence as a compendium of obscure facts and anecdotes, many of which are very entertaining. Short character sketches range from the fairly well ...”

“... the threshold places, the hidden rivers and eerie copses of the British landscape.5 At first it may feel rather chilly, but with time, it provokes an altogether more fearful, feral, intemperate dreaming.We know all the essential passport application stuff about Bush, and down the years she’s dutifully done the odd unrevealingly bland Q&A, but there’s an ...”

“... a lot of predictable wangles and fiddles, along with a very few cases of prima facie fraud, which may or may not stand the test of criminal prosecution. But it has used a brush so broad and coarse that, for every small iniquity it has uncovered, it has held up to public ridicule an MP who was evidently trying his or her ...”

“... felt proud of their victory; which I suppose was to their credit. The other thing that may have banished it from our memories is that in the broader context of imperial history it seems so marginal – especially if you don’t know about those blackened corpses. It didn’t expand the area of the empire by very much: just the tiny island of Hong ...”

“... elderly victims. The myth of an ‘orderly’ British retreat became more difficult to sustain. It may also have become less necessary, as time has passed and we have come to acknowledge the darker side of British imperialism. Any school syllabus that left out the atrocities committed by the British would immediately be seen now as the propaganda such courses ...”

“... from whom (in Italian) Languet sent Sidney in November 1573, hoping that ‘in admiring it you may perpetually gaze upon his eloquence and keep it before you as an example.’ ‘I have thoroughly read the delightful letter,’ Sidney responded dutifully (in Latin), ‘and picked some flowers from it, which I have imitated as I cannot easily better ...”

“... This book attracted a lot of attention when it first appeared in the US in May because it apparently showed Israel offering to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa. That happened some time ago, but it is bound to be an embarrassment to present-day Israel, especially on the eve of high-level non-proliferation negotiations focusing on the Middle East ...”

“... Panium, who went to Attila’s camp as an envoy from Byzantium. This accident of literary survival may, to some extent, skew our perception of the formation of Byzantine policy. But Luttwak is tapping into an exceptional curiosity about Attila among 21st-century readers. In the last few years, he has been the subject of major books in Italian (Giuseppe ...”