“... 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 ...”

“... associations, was still finding it difficult to write. ‘Incapable of lecturing or of publishing major works, he sought a new role as independent adviser, stimulator and organiser,’ and made the mistake of accepting an invitation from the publisher Paul Siebeck to produce a new handbook of political economy. One by one, the 45 contributors deserted, and he ...”

“... soul? A few white scholars thought the task impossible. Indeed, one of the most famous – John Burgess, founder of Columbia’s School of Political Science and of the Political Science Quarterly – opposed President McKinley’s imperial adventuring precisely because it threatened the democratic institutions he thought suited to ...”

“... friend and mentor Millicent Garrett Fawcett – you wouldn’t know that its writer played a major role in the events described at the end, when an ‘almost religious fervour … sent young ladies to street corners to demand the vote’, and to pledge ‘their whole lives to the Cause’. In February 1918, when the vote was finally granted to ...”

“... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...”