“... Minister for Science and Technology, minister responsible for the problems of unemployment in the North-East (Hogg immediately donned a cloth cap), minister responsible for sport, minister in charge of negotiations with the US and the Soviet Union to get a nuclear test ban treaty signed. This last job brought him into collision with the immensely experienced ...”

“... was intended. At the time of its publication, Rousseau was living in Montmorency, a little north of Paris; friends warned him that he was about to be arrested, and he fled for what he hoped might be the safety of Switzerland. In his Confessions he records one aspect of his flight with some amusement: ‘Between La Barre and Montmorency I met, in a ...”

“... friend Lewis Campbell saw him as ‘a country gentleman, or rather, to be more accurate, a North Country laird’. Maxwell lived in a rather less divided culture than that of C.P. Snow’s absurd caricature. In 1873, he suggested a joke question for the Cambridge mathematics examination, inviting candidates to interpret every vector ‘in literary ...”

“... Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh.) And the realisation of what separation means, put forward by John Bowlby and others, ended the disastrous practice of keeping parents away from child patients in hospitals. In North London, more was being learned about children separated from their families. At Anna Freud’s Hampstead ...”

“... noodles and foreign holidays. He recommends his travel agent, Philip Davies of Real Holidays, in North London. Presumably Mr Davies sent him East, because it was on the shores of an Oriental sea that Leadbeater had a blinding flash and realised that humans could develop joint stock companies and the iMac because they weren’t crustaceans. A chapter on ...”

“... so he concentrated on that. He then had the brainwave of buying the votes of the nine mountain and North-Western states by getting the Southern bloc to support the proposal for a federal dam in Hell’s Canyon (while ensuring that this proposal would fail in the end – the private power companies wouldn’t like it). LBJ was far more than a match for the GOP ...”

“... he was also strongly partisan; on occasions, he came close to ‘going native’, in the manner of John Reed with the Red Guards in Petrograd. His journalism always threatened to tip over into a more direct, military involvement – until he finally became, and died, a soldier. A South African born into a liberal, newspaper-owning family in the Eastern ...”

“... on the Mexican-American border, and Shirin Neshat’s use of Iranian imagery in a film shot in the north of Mexico. But most extraordinary of all was the work created by Multiplicity, a Milan-based group of architects, TV producers, photographers, urban planners, geographers, sociologists and film-makers. They created a video installation with nine TV ...”

“... joke: ‘Muhammad Ali was Jewish’ (Chapter 2); ‘Bette Davis was Jewish’ (Chapter 3); ‘John Lennon was Jewish’ (Chapter 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz #1) Q. When Alex and Adam had a smoke, how much of ...”

“... even foreword mail. An introduction presupposes ignorance. When Albert J. Guerard introduced John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under ...”

“... champagne and brandy . . . to incapacitate any lesser man’, as his private secretary John Colville put it. He would talk to ministers with Toby, his budgie, alighting (and sometimes doing more than that) on their heads. He had frequent sleeps. His method of dealing with crises, he explained, was to ‘turn out the light, say “bugger ...”

“... histories, Davies writes, ‘it is as if Anglo-Saxon England were bordered by an ocean to the north and the west as well as by a channel to the south. The mental planet that is peopled by Alfred and the Danes and Harold and the Conqueror has no place whatsoever for Hywell Dda, for Brian Boru, for Kenneth Mac Alpin or Macbeth.’ The culprits here were the ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... one is in the room except a shy freshman. The funny man climbs a rickety ladder to the top of the north-east corner of the room. The books are shelved alphabetically by author; the As begin in that corner. He picks up the first book, reads a few pages, slams it shut, picks up the second … The other novelty contained in this book is the translation of a talk ...”

“... sleeping on the streets of Manhattan. There are more rodents currently infected with plague in North America (mostly in rural western states: Wyoming, Montana, Colorado) than there were in Europe at the time of the Black Death. Whenever we see a rat, it’s a weak rat, forced into the open to look for food; the strong ones stay out of sight. Brown rats ...”