“... European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns it, Was ist ...”

“... and the comparison of characters with literary and artistic figures: Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Taylor, Romy Schneider, Maigret.Le Cheval blanc d’Uffington deals with an author who has secluded herself on an island to avoid strong sensation, choosing to write about the world instead of experiencing it. ‘For a year, I had incessantly questioned myself as ...”

“... as we know both from later memoirs about the passing on of the title role from Burbage to Joseph Taylor and from records of performances in the 1630s for Charles I’s court. Even after London’s playhouses were closed by the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, an anonymous adaptor produced a truncated version suitable for surreptitious performance at fairs and ...”

“... by frantic diplomatic misunderstandings and miscalculations, not a million miles from A.J.P. Taylor’s thesis that inflexible railway schedules were to blame. In War by Timetable (1969), Taylor argued airily: ‘the Germans had no deliberate aim of subverting the liberties of Europe. No one had time for a deliberate ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... Galip, are esoteric commentaries on Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Mathnawi – a 13th-century work which Robert Irwin has described as ‘a great sprawling series of stories within stories’ in which ‘the inner stories . . . indicate the mystical meanings of the outer stories’ – the reader’s head starts to throb. It’s also true that Borges-style novels ...”

“... better to do in England, and were happy to be swept along in the charismatic wake of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom they had just shared an enchanted year of poetry and talk in the Quantocks in Somerset, and who was now eager to learn about German science. The principal production of their year together was the collaborative volume, Lyrical ...”

“... the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left ...”

“... offered her a retainer of a thousand pounds a year: ‘Let me know how funny you think this is.’ Robert Yeatman (who took over as Spark’s editor at Macmillan) once dared to query the phrasing of a single sentence in The Girls of Slender Means and was told: ‘It’s exactly what I intend, and the style is my own. I’m sorry if you don’t like it; but ...”

“... a small horde of Belle Epoque celebrities – everybody from Pierre Louÿs, Mata Hari and Comte Robert de Montesquiou, to Gide, Colette, Rémy de Gourmont, Paul Valéry, Sacha Guitry, Salomon Reinach and the buxom brunette diva Emma Calvé. (It was de Gourmont who nicknamed Barney ‘L’Amazone’, the monicker under which she would publish three books of ...”

“... the record’s contents. He’d been using the alias since the summer of 1960. His given name was Robert Zimmerman and he had grown up in Hibbing, a small mining town in Minnesota; he was the son of Abe, an electrical goods supplier, and Beatty, and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The name he chose has often been said to be a tribute to ...”

“... publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable ...”

“... be asked and complaints pursued and (sometimes) compensation obtained without going to law. Arthur Taylor’s useful essay contrasts the reasonably swift and productive hospital complaints procedure with the often complicated and frustrating family health service procedure when the complaint is against a GP. He looks also at the Health Service ombudsman, whose ...”

“... recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of course, which he also piloted. ‘I’m confident we’re going to have something good,’ he said at the end of ...”

“... Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often ...”