“... the ethnographic profession: it is merely a form of servitude, it burdens effective work with the weight of weeks or months lost in travelling; idle hours in which informants disappear; hunger, fatigue, sometimes illness; and always those thousand duties which consume the days in pure loss and reduce the dangerous life in the virgin forest to an imitation of ...”

“... or thirty times the annual income of a schoolmaster. By the later 1580s Ralegh had acquired enough weight to throw it around. In 1587 he wrote to the warden of All Souls telling the college to hand over some woodlands in Middlesex to a kinswoman of his. Ralegh swaggeringly raps the knuckles of the low-life dons: the queen ‘greatly disdayned to wryte twyse to ...”

“... What could possibly be down there? Two new fish have risen to this bait. Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht’s Finding an Ending proceeds from their conviction that ‘Wagner’s libretto, ponderous and mannered though it may sometimes seem (and be), is charged with life and significance.’ They therefore propose ‘to probe its philosophical and ...”

“... Affairs in 1964-65, Crosland advocated the devaluation of sterling: but his opinion did not carry weight, and devaluation was postponed. His promotion to the job of Education Secretary gave him much more scope. His vision was bold. He was under no illusions about the necessity for reforming a school system which he saw as ‘divisive, unjust and ...”

“... books a year. And King is not one for the slim volume. Three pounds or more is the normal hardback weight of his novels and two of them (The Talisman and It) exceed a thousand pages in paperback. If nothing else, King has liberated horror from the confinement of the short story and the Jamesian miniature. Given his head, King would certainly swamp the market ...”

“... dominant image. For him, the present rot can be traced directly to the 1960s: specifically to Richard Neville’s Play Power, with its demonic slogan ‘the weapons of revolution are obscenity, blasphemy and drugs.’ Holbrook still sees that era – which began with the 1960 Lady Chatterley acquittal and ended with the Gay News prosecution in 1976 – as ...”

“... readers? A few scholars have solved this difficulty by adopting a narrow geographical format. Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991), for example, is a brilliant history of how the French, British and American empires interacted both with each other and with native Indians over two centuries in the Great Lakes region of North America. But what if one ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... within three weeks of taking a ‘very moderate dose, of the weakest steroid they make’, my weight had shot from eight stone to eleven stone. Fat that feels as if my body has been stuffed with some alien gel settled in particular places. My face and body have rounded. Cushing’s syndrome. The shock I get from an ill-advised glance into a looking-glass ...”

“... which went into service in 1949. It was long and streamlined unlike the short fat B-4 but its weight of around ten thousand pounds and its size meant that it was unsuitable for the RAF’s only available jet bomber, the Canberra. Blue Danube did not go into operation with the RAF’s first V-bomber squadrons until 1956. Meanwhile work at Aldermaston was ...”

“... was purely contingent: any non-cannibal form of ‘necessity’ would legally have been of equal weight or non-weight, and the subsequent ‘authority’ of this legal precedent has presumably been confined to non-cannibal cases. In July 1884 the sea-going yacht Mignonette sank in the South Atlantic, midway between St ...”

“... the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus under Richard Hickox and not be shattered into submission. Belshazzar’s Feast takes Elgarian oratorio by its neck and flings it into the 20th century. But it is dramatically broken-backed. Its performing forces are massive; its timescale – it lasts roughly thirty ...”

“... life. He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have led his protégé ‘into ...”

“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

“... before seen in this country. At times, indeed, it was going up by a thousand a month, which, as Richard Tilt, the director general of the Prison Service, has pointed out, requires a new prison every three weeks to house the intake. If Howard’s Crime (Sentencing) Bill goes through Parliament, it will add between 10,000 and 30,000 prisoners to the present ...”