“... a 1386 copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, or history of the world, now in the library of St John’s, Oxford, the text is followed not only by an index, but also by an account of how to use it: ‘This number, 72, indicates that the heading from the table can be found on the leaf where 72 is written in the top corner.’ Unfortunately, the scribe copied ...”

“... of Oxford, Museum of Natural History Here at last is an authority who considers it a ‘gross simplification’ to argue that the marble sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome was completely covered in opaque paint. Why, if this was always so, bother to extract and transport with such difficulty, and at such cost, the finest Parian marble? And why was ...”

“... biographies (of the queen and Princess Diana). Junor, however, is a career journalist, daughter of John Junor, the former editor in chief of the Sunday Express, and she is much closer to her material. She has written two lives of Charles and one each of Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry, as well as a group portrait of ‘the troubled life of the House of ...”

“... of the AFL-CIO, LBJ managed to get the railway brotherhoods and even the mineworkers’ leader, John L. Lewis, to support the extension of jury trial, for they had suffered from the lack of it under the Taft-Hartley Act and then, by delaying all other legislation, even got the postal unions to lobby for the Bill in their desperation to get it out of the way ...”

“... are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous consequences: he renounced the fictional space and limited the dramatic power of painting; what remained suitable for an easel picture and was to be ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... is and is not. The story, reprinted in Peake’s Progress, first appeared alongside stories by John Wyndham and William Golding in 1956, in a collection called Sometime, Never. Taken together the three stories read more like fables than fantasy or science fiction, and they glance curiously at the contemporary world they are not directly seeking to ...”

“... A large proportion of what the boys paid went directly to the Head. By the late 1850s, his gross takings (before paying his assistant staff) were somewhere between £10,000 and £12,000 – making him, as Christopher Tyerman calculates, ‘the equivalent of a modern millionaire’. In 1859 he might have expected to move on to the mastership of an ...”

“... mixing high and low authorities; long, feverish run-on sentences, desperately semaphoring their gross mimetic appetite, their need to capture as much of ‘the madness of the times’ as possible, as much of ‘the way we live now’; and a frequent oiling of italics. A parody would go like this: Brian idly fingered the minibar. It was happily ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”

“... to this effect. Although the American Statistical Association quickly identified ‘various and gross errors’ in the count (‘insane’ Blacks were recorded in some Massachusetts towns that had no Black population), the figures continued to be wielded by pro-slavery congressmen. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of those who expressed outrage that ‘the ...”

“... 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney ...”

“... attempted election grab of 2020-21 has been described as ‘a coup in search of a legal theory’: John Eastman, the director of the Claremont Centre for Constitutional Jurisprudence, provided the theory in a legal memo that exaggerated the constitutional role of the then vice president, Mike Pence, in the congressional counting of Electoral College ...”

“... of Frank Vincent Zappa’s monstrous oeuvre. It’s a stroll to realign (straighten out) the gross products of this freak-wrangler supreme, the Laurel Canyon, cottage industry, family man. Zappa: boastfully non-PC, polymorphously perverse, the L. Ron Hubbard of multi-tracked deviance. An agnostic refusenik who gets paranoid standing next to his own ...”