“... Liverpool. The virus was being grown in fertile hens’ eggs. One of the membranes attached to the young embryo was ‘dropped’ by making an artificial air space between it and the shell, creating a kind of platform. After being inoculated onto it the virus grew in its cells, producing small lesions called pocks. After pock formation the egg was cut open and ...”

“... case, a technical prerequisite. You need an A-bomb to ignite an H-bomb, and the lab’s Director Robert Oppenheimer reasonably enough felt that the race to forestall the Nazis required no distractions from the main lines of development. Destructive friction between fusion and fission was reduced by giving Teller what was essentially a roaming brief, and it ...”

“... and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out ...”

“... The soundtrack might be Muddy Waters singing ‘You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had’ or Robert Johnson’s ‘Drunken Hearted Man’. Repetition, sexual boasting, showy licks and riffs: the novel has it all. There is even a touch of satanic folklore, in the shape of a ghostly hobo rumoured to be the devil himself. While not exactly ...”

“... the heaviness of air in the Discorsi (1638). Through meticulous archival research in Italy, the young American historian Renée Raphael has demonstrated that Jesuit university teachers (but also readers of English, Irish and French origins) incorporated Galileo’s experimental results and theoretical conclusions into their work, not because the ...”

“... a 24-year-old RKO contract player who had just been nominated for an Oscar for Crossfire, played a young singer (though she didn’t sing herself). By 1 June, when Ray and Grahame married in Las Vegas, she was four months pregnant with their son Tim. When Bogart bought the rights to Hughes’s novel, he imagined Lauren Bacall for the role of Laurel Gray. The ...”

“... and Susan Ramsay, the wives of notable future governor-generals, became her ladies-in-waiting. The young Lord Dalhousie organised her first visits outside London. In the years that followed, an increasing flow of petitions came to her and Albert from India, as well as a stream of gifts, both splendid and humble, the latter often handicrafts, which she much ...”

“... harbour. He spent a few years in Philadelphia pretending to be a student before coming home to a young country whose early optimism was being replaced with rising panic and cynicism.‘Just after independence,’ Yepoka Yeebo writes in her new book about Blay-Miezah, ‘there really was a plot to take Ghana’s gold reserves out of the country.’ Although ...”

“... 22 June they were forced to surrender.A few days later in Nancy, the occupying forces arrested a young medical orderly while he was trying to escape into the countryside on an old bicycle without tyres. He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... manufactured by Dow in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned ...”

“... Cerdan, had died in a plane crash on 28 October 1949. They knew about her affairs with a string of young protégés, including Yves Montand. In 1952, they may have pored over photos of her wedding to Jacques Pills, a French singer and songwriter with dark matinée idol good looks. Dietrich was the matron of honour. The audience also knew that she’d been in ...”

“... saviour and leader, yet refused to reduce the size of his army. In 1817, the British officer Robert Wilson pointed out that Russia’s population had grown from 22 million to at least 42 million since 1762. In 1828, de Lacy Evans estimated that Russia’s population was 50 million and would reach 73 million in another fifteen years. Since the ...”

“... her novels from the 1970s is The Driver’s Seat (1970) – Spark’s own favourite – in which a young woman sets out to get murdered and wears a flamboyant dress so that plenty of people notice her in the moments before her death. It was in part an experiment in the nouveau roman, but it became more than that because, despite its emotionally detached ...”

“... the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids ...”