“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...”

“... and Facebook have trouble grasping the differences between people and machines. Apple is the only major technology company for which technology is a slave to taste. Over and over again, Jobs made large bets on his own ability to tell the market what it ought to want, and the market obeyed. This is part of what made Apple different: the wild innovations of ...”

“... back to New York, where Hobie is waiting to fill the role of substitute father. After the only major temporal dissolve, we catch up with Theo eight years later. Having had an undistinguished college career, he’s taken over the sales-and-money side of Hobie’s business and made a success of it. But he’s addicted to pharmaceutical opiates, tortured by ...”

“... Wiener presided, then a year at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study as an assistant to John von Neumann. A chance meeting with Robert Oppenheimer led to an invitation to talk about the Zipf-Mandelbrot law at the Institute. The talk fell flat, people fell asleep, and a distinguished historian of mathematics stood up and declared he hadn’t ...”

“... looking for an imam often end up hiring graduates of these seminaries, giving the Deobandis a major role in the development of British Islam. Before 9/11, Deobandi mosques openly invited violent jihadis to Britain for speaking tours on which they encouraged young Muslims to head out east to fight jihad. Today such activities are more limited and more ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles’. Feynman’s major contribution to the field was essentially a brilliant bookkeeping device, a set of stunningly simple graphic conventions (‘Feynman diagrams’) allowing physicists to describe the complex interactions of subatomic particles and to avoid some horrendous ...”

“... cannot be assimilated to that encoded on the processor of a computer, how are we to understand it? John Gurdon demonstrated in the 1970s that the nucleus of a fully differentiated adult frog cell can be ‘reprogrammed’ by transferring it into a fertilised egg from which the nucleus has been removed: embryonic development follows. The same experiment was ...”

“... pleasure in the greening of his bronzes by oxidation (especially near the sea). Talking to John Fowles in 1987, Andy Goldsworthy came out with this wonderfully relaxed notion: ‘Ten years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried under the sand, unseen. All my work still exists, in some form.’ That is of course true of ...”

“... the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression to another. The two time-schemes are, in fact, related. In 1921, the business negotiations to finance the proposed journal had to be suspended when Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown; it was during his convalescence from this illness ...”

“... achievements: ‘he brought in the movies, the school, the hobby programme. He began many of the major reforms which later became pilot programmes for the entire nation, and thousands of men have done easier and more productive time because of him.’) ‘Bibliotherapy’ was among the biggest of the changes he introduced to aid prisoner ...”

“... in 1781, and that of the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was ...”

“... interested in the work of Fernand Léger, whose latest paintings combined Cubism and Futurism: John Golding has construed Malevich’s 1912 painting The Knife Grinder: Principle of Flickering as ‘a marriage between Léger’s Woman in Blue and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912’. Like Duchamp’s painting, The Knife Grinder depicted motion ...”

“... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ...”