“... later restitution and final division. One might expect that all these variations would lead to major differences of demography. After all, Ladurie suggests, the custom of primogeniture (he remarks en passant how snobbish and affected of the English peasants it was to follow this) helped to make England a land of emigration. One would suppose that by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... will never match up to the number of votes cast in their favour. So long therefore as both major parties resolutely reject any form of proportional representation, only by some kind of power-sharing can the Liberals hope to bribe one or other of those parties into accepting PR as the price of guaranteed support for some of their own policies. But once ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”

“... guides to all they see, but may well also feel the want of more information about the major styles involved than Professor Pevsner’s peremptory abbreviations: E.E., Dec., Perp. etc. The Babel of architectural traditions in most medieval cathedrals makes rigid consistency well-nigh impossible, and alternative allocations would be open to the same ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... the bizarre episode of the Crockford Preface, it was unfortunate for the Church that its two major preoccupations should have appeared to be both concerned with sex – with the appropriateness, or otherwise, of women as priests and with the acceptability, or otherwise, of homosexuals as candidates for ordination. If, even a few years ago, any TV commedy ...”

“... as God’s service or the obligations of feudal allegiance. His later chapters on a series of major works present some problems. Mainline Puritan writings are perhaps the least satisfactorily treated throughout the volume, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, for example, being virtually ignored in spite of its signal transfer of emphasis from the Truth that life ...”