“... with books. One by one, they delivered me mini lectures on the subject of my recent book. It took me a while to realise what was happening. They were connecting themselves to my research, inserting themselves into my story. At the end of the visit, the department organised a ‘presentation’ of the book. The whole department showed up. This turned out ...”

“... he discovered Jung, and wrote a good number of fantasies about the anima. London, however, never took himself wholly seriously: there is something almost Pushkinesque about the lightheartedness with which he mixes the short-story genres together, so that each makes a certain amount of sly fun of the other. What he lacks in the master touch he can make up in ...”

“... meanwhile, things were changing fast. In Baroque Bohemia, as Tuck-well lucidly relates, the horn took a ‘great leap forward’ from the chase to the chamber group. In the early 1680s, a certain Franz Anton, Count von Sporck found himself so pleased by the cors de chasse at Louis XIV’s court that he took some horns home ...”

“... battle: one into brewery management, the youngest (Cobb’s father) into civil engineering, which took him to South Africa in the Boer War and later to the Sudan. A gentle but positive man, Cobb père no more than mildly resented this choice of an avocation for him, making a success of it to the point of being able to send his daughter to the Godophin School ...”

“... had seen television as a threat and largely ignored it. Lamb thought that a mistake, and instead took the opposite line of saturating his readers with stories about TV, on the grounds that, quite simply, it was what people were most interested in. In the first hundred days of Lamb’s editorship, the Sun’s circulation went from 650,000 to 1.5m copies. By ...”

“... are in real sympathy, and can thus complement one another. In a celebrated inaugural lecture, John Carey suggested nonetheless that the process had gone too far, and that even giants like Empson and C.S. Lewis could be guilty in this way of serious distortions of a text: he instanced a bravura passage in The Allegory of Love on Spenser’s ‘Bower of ...”

“... article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle certain coke bottles in an empty six-pack while he was out of the room for a couple of minutes. Detection proved too easy: ‘As soon as you put ...”

“... of a film of Firbank toiling up the hill at Genzano on an expedition to Lake Nemi (a trip that took place, according to Lord Berners’s memoir of the writer, a few days before his death). A crowd of children, attracted by Firbank’s fatally idiosyncratic walk, collects and capers around him. The marionette of a man, on his last legs, had been picked on ...”

“... and trading primarily with Asia. The Ben Line operated a fleet of mainly cargo vessels which also took some passengers. There were fourteen passengers on board the Benvalla and the journey was supposed to take four weeks, including stops. But on 5 June, the day before we were supposed to pass through the Suez Canal, the Six-Day War broke out.The canal ...”

“... in the ethnic sense of a people joined by blood. Aly is not simply arguing that Hitler took from the rich and gave to the poor, but that the regime also supported the Volk at the expense of those deemed to be racially alien. The most memorable examples of this concern the activities of German soldiers outside Germany. When they occupied other ...”

“... while in the new climate three years later a number of Dutch, German and Hungarian ex-Dadaists took part in the Dusseldorf and Weimar meetings to plan an avant-garde artists’ international. It was in this hopeful spirit that Constructivism first came to the Bauhaus. Kandinsky arrived to join the staff in June 1922, Moholy-Nagy in March 1923; and within a ...”

“... not someone who grew sick of the publishing process and walked away, but someone who never took part in it. From a far distance, Pynchon’s identity seemed as mysterious and indecipherable as the Antikythera mechanism. When he won a National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow he sent a comedian to accept it in his place. Who could he be, this ...”

“... women’s factory teams to raise money for the war-wounded. On Christmas Day that year the side took on Arundel Coulthard Foundry in front of ten thousand spectators at Deepdale. The team continued to play after the war and toured France. On Boxing Day 1920, at the height of their fame, the Dick, Kerr Ladies played St Helens Ladies at Goodison Park, drawing ...”

“... noticed, they were looking (or Curzio was) for some headline-hitting coup. One hot afternoon they took a boring walk down to the local river, and came back with the first of the scarith, pulled out from under some surface scrub. Inside the package appeared to be the last will and testament, in Latin, of a first-century BC Volterran called Prospero; he ...”

“... Pavements considerably, all the while enjoying a well-rounded private life: after an affair with John Gilbert, she took up with young buck Gary Cooper ... You can feel Nemesis coming on with every drop of a name. Sure enough: Her bedroom was chock-a-block with gardenias and tuberoses; it glowed with the flicker of ...”