“... fastened to a turtledove, he found a piece of parchment that read: ‘This day, 6 June 1786, this iron box, containing six handkerchiefs, was placed among the roots of an orange tree by me, Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro, to serve in the performance of an act of magic, which will be executed on the same day sixty years hence before Louis-Philippe of Orléans ...”

“... major European writer or artist. It is crammed with curios and choice anecdotes, all the way from Richard III’s hump to an oiled arm in a Mapplethorpe photograph probing a gaping anus. In a work which ranges effortlessly across the major arts, we are treated to learned disquisitions on Boethius, Hildegard of Bingen, Pico della ...”

“... is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached ...”

“... industrial region was initially named after a Welsh entrepreneur called John Hughes, who set up an iron-smelting works there in the 1870s (Hughesovka gradually mutating into Yuzovka), attracting Greeks, Tatars, Serbs, Bulgarians, Poles, Jews and Russians to work there (Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev moved to the region with their parents before the ...”

“... centre which Wertham opened in a church basement in Harlem in 1946 with help from Ellison and Richard Wright. Six years later Wertham was called as an expert witness for the NAACP in one of the cases reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. With the evidence of his experiences treating traumatised children in Harlem, he persuaded a federal judge that ...”

“... proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful ...”

“... time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes people think in the wrong ...”

“... her alone. Take for a final example the renowned physician, collector and charitable benefactor Richard Mead. When Pilkington first approached him for assistance – she was a distant relation of the Irish branch of the Mead family and was going by the name ‘Mrs Meade’ at the time – he humiliated her, deflating her literary aspirations and dispensing ...”

“... husband published their drawings for an unbuilt scheme, a concrete house with a flat corrugated iron roof and ‘no internal finishes whatsoever’: had they not been thwarted in their attempt to buy the site in Soho, this would, as they put it, have been the first example of the ‘new brutalism’ in Britain. The phrase stuck. With a leading role in an ...”

“... shreds of her clothing still had power to heal. Women gave birth more easily when stroked by the iron belt of some ascetic who in life would have been appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of ...”

“... Fifa committee were extremely hard to buy. The Argentinian representative, Julio Grondona, whose iron control of his country’s FA dated back to the days of the junta, later said that he had been open to voting for England, but his price would have been the return of the Falkland Islands. The official figure put on the cost of the FA bid was £21 ...”

“... for full-blown black magic rituals. Parson Adams is strapped to a chair, his head enclosed in an iron mask equipped with an obscenely phallic and pendulous nose, while Fanny is tied down and offered up as a virginal sacrifice to a troupe of depraved nymphets wearing nun’s habits which have been modified to expose their breasts. Down in the ...”

“... trees with the winning name of the Sentier de la Vertu.This is where I lie in wait, sitting on an iron chair, camera controls fine-adjusted. Distance: four to five metres; speed: shutter screen slit 4mm; aperture: depending on which direction she arrives from. I’m very good at roughly guessing the distance. What’s less easy is if she has just one foot ...”

“... place of ‘the homosexual’ (what does that now mean?) remains undiscussed. The sociobiologistic iron cage – that homosexuals, outside the network of genetic self-advantage, can be thought of as genuinely altruistic – still seems to be present. In the light of the chaotic sexual performance of much of natural life, it’s time to move beyond this ...”

“... This is an insight which, developed mathematically, has quite transformed the classical picture of iron laws and inexorable unfoldings. In one of his many postscripts, he refers warmly to one particular applied mathematician, S.M. Ulam, who developed these ideas. Hofstadter is too honest to pass over the fact that Ulam was deeply involved with the development ...”