“... to bourgeois European notions of the home, the parlour and of harmony in every sense required major ideological adjustments. The piano embodied a kind of Enlightenment clarity: its keyboard made manifest, literally in black and white, a tonal range independent of muscles, lungs or lips. Its individual notes, percussively produced, were ‘given’ and, in ...”

“... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...”

“... perhaps doesn’t make enough of the huge Allied superiority in planes and tanks, which played a major part in that year’s summer offensive – but he is surely right to argue that American intervention was crucial, not because of anything the Americans did (as Malcolm Brown and John Keegan show, the Canadians and ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...”

“... countries of Britain, Ireland and Germany, while Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union – the major nurseries of the third wave’s new immigrants – together received about 10 per cent. Further evidence of the climate of racist thinking that informed the 1924 statute were the provisos debarring all Asians from entry, and declaring those already in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Statues meurent aussi (1953) and the ground-breaking Nuit et brouillard (1955); he then became a major figure in the French short film industry of the 1950s and 1960s, pioneering a new genre, ‘the essay-film’, in a series of documentaries from around the world. In all, he has made more than forty films and published seven books of photographs; in the ...”

“... Burnley and Wolves. In 1861, at under 20,000, Middlesbrough’s population could not support a major club, but by 1881 it had 55,934 inhabitants and by 1901, 91,302. Middlesbrough FC followed this curve. It was founded in 1876, went professional in 1889 and was in Division I by 1902. The football revolution had enormous social significance. Above all, it ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... had been Modern; by the time of Pleasures of Architecture (1924), Functionalist. The Tragedy of John Ruskin (1928) retained the scorn and condescension but had, now, some sense of a Labour ethos. By the time of Left Review and The Big Firm she was hitching the proletarianisation of literature to a pretty crude economic determinism – an affair she would ...”

“... joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky Prize: ‘He has become a star by sheer virtue of the fact that he is a ...”