“... Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around ...”

“... which many, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Lem’s most crucial English translator, Michael Kandel, claim as their favourite, and the paranoid-picaresque novels Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress, which as a teenage reader I made my talismans.The preoccupations of Lem Two resemble those of Lem One. The ...”

“... 14-liner Pushkin invented for Eugene Onegin. This last he adopts for his letter from Moscow to Michael Frayn. Here the subject curdles unpleasantly and James the Cold Warrior puts in an appearance. I am sorry to see him joining Bernard Levin in offering a thanksgiving for the bomb which has guaranteed four decades of peace in Europe. It’s true that any ...”

“... Edison survived to the age of 84 on meals weighing no more than four or five ounces.)Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and others like them, had made science fashionable, popular and hugely exciting. Edison and his schoolfellows began experimenting with chemical reactions. At the age of 12, with the help of a friend, he built a half-mile-long telegraph line ...”

“... sort all that out, it would shaft him, this brief he’d inherited from that other nearly-man, Michael Heseltine. New Labour had so much riding on the tent show, but it was beginning to assume the triumphalist aspect of the Sheffield rally that did for Neil Kinnock. The decision taken, to ride with the decelerating Tory pitch, there was no way out. You ...”

“... over Christmas to give a paper to the American Philological Association. ‘I was left then in the snow and ice with a can opener,’ she later remembered, ‘so I wouldn’t starve. You know, if I couldn’t get out.’ Milman sent her a telegram from New York to say he’d accepted a job offer from Harvard. The months in Iowa were ‘about the low point of ...”

“... cultural antennae, as well as an indicator of an obvious affinity, that he could describe C.P. Snow’s (thin and tendentious) ‘Two Cultures’ lecture as ‘one of the most important philosophical essays to appear since the war’. He not only shared Snow’s enthusiasm for industrialism as the route to improving the ...”

“... Henry (he’d better have his name; we’re going to be with him for a while), sits watching the snow falling while he drinks a bottle of Asti with a friend. Later, over too much wine and Strega, he explains to a priest his regret at not having gone to Abruzzi. The first time he is at the villa housing the British Hospital he is upstairs drinking two glasses ...”

“... sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn ...”

“... in Britain. When Pilkington Glass went public a Scottish architect of no great distinction, Michael Spens, became a millionaire. He bought Studio International, which as the Studio had been publishing since 1893. It had more institutional subscribers – i.e. annually renewed subscriptions by libraries both here and abroad – than the whole print run ...”

“... on 78 records, 48 of them LPs. The compliments paid to him have been extravagant and impressive. Michael Foot sees resemblances to both Chaplin and Swift, describing him as ‘a comic genius’. The tribute is topped by Robert Graves, for whom Spike is ‘a great genius’. The Monty Python team are cited as finding him not just the original precursor of ...”

“... she became convinced he was in love with the magazine’s editor and ran out of the house into the snow in her dressing-gown and slippers; he came loping after her in long johns and waistcoat and dragged her back into the house, soaked and frozen. Tolstoy’s version of the same events makes no mention of threatening to leave or of his trying to get her ...”

“... Australia and Canada, but she had heard nothing from the Embassy and it was winter now; the heavy snow and the agreement between Washington and Belgrade two months earlier had produced a lull in hostilities, even though both sides were preparing for all-out war in the spring. Her father was steeped in pessimism. He saw his predicament in terms of the far ...”

“... line to Putin … he would not be making a regular spectacle of himself,’ the military analyst Michael Kofman, recently returned from Bakhmut, said in a podcast. ‘The reason he’s doing it is because he’s very desperate and he’s trying to get Putin’s attention by speaking to him this way, the way I would say some years ago I used to see people on ...”

“... wealth and sexual prowess was marshalled to conquer (read “violate”) the blonde English snow fairy,’ he wrote in al-Ahram Weekly. And in impressive support of his opinion, he cited the 10 August issue of the Sunday Times: Does he [al-Fayed senior] hope that William’s coronation, in however many decades’ time, will have an Alexandrian air due ...”