“... Royal Africa Company to salvage a sunken treasure-ship off the Sussex coast, designing a diving-bell for the purpose, and going down in it himself. From 1698 to 1701, he was master and commander of the tiny Royal Navy ship Paramore, again in the South Atlantic. This was, it has been said, ‘the first sea journey undertaken for a purely scientific ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... or so before he died, according to Charles Greville, George IV slept badly and used to ring his bell ‘forty times in the night’. He had a watch close by him, but he sent for his valet de chambre rather than look at it. ‘The same thing if he wants a glass of water; he won’t stretch out his hand to get it.’ This selfishness was not a reversion to ...”

“... door so I answer the door.’ The ‘tall, sturdily built African-American woman’ who rang the bell asks if she can use his phone to call the police because her car has broken down. He lets her in, and she’s soon followed by a man with a gun. They crack his skull, tie him up, and empty his apartment of valuables. But the thieves don’t have room in ...”

“... advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public ...”

“... She believes that Gödel’s theorems were designed to refute the formalist programme of David Hilbert, according to which mathematics is just an arbitrary human creation, ‘a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper’. Wrong, wrong, wrong! But we can see how Goldstein was misled. There is no doubt that the ...”

“... is often seen in mid-air, being thrown from the roof of a New York hotel in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or drifting, sometimes on fire, through the fables of Angela Carter. Meanwhile, back in the 1920s on the morning of her party, Clarissa Dalloway is mending a tear in her green dress. It is a favourite dress. It would be anyone’s favourite dress because ...”

“... unspoiled by American junkery. He complains constantly about the omnipresence of Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. However, he is a good reporter and doesn’t leave the matter there: he reports that Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are not just installed, they are ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... dicta gathered together in the Yale Book does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled loup and no ...”

“... between 1923 and 1927 there were more than two hundred contributions by or about the group. Clive Bell went to the Paris exhibitions, there were stories by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was ...”

“... All Souls, where Lawrence was a fellow. In the event Lawrence contented himself with ringing a bell in college in the middle of the day, since All Souls ‘needs waking up’. Graves and Nancy tried to support themselves while he was in theory an undergraduate by setting up a general store in Boars Hill outside Oxford, the landscape across which Matthew ...”

“... attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal mixes. He was in a white shirt, unbuttoned to expose ‘chunks of magical Buddhist gold’. The hair had recovered its collartickling insolence. The ...”