“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Why, in the great majority of animals, are there equal numbers of males and females? For John Arbuthnot, writing in 1710, it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no parental care, and in which one male can fertilise many females, and yet which have an equal sex ratio ...”

“... to the eldest son and heir? Not a bit: it seems to have come as quite a relief to her, although it took her some time to produce children of her own. She fitted as snugly in Emily’s bosom as did everyone else. Of course Emily was resented by some. Edward FitzGerald, the poet of Omar Khayyam, clearly could not stand her, but he was probably jealous of her ...”

“... that won their release after a couple of weeks. Voronel got his visa at the end of 1974, and Azbel took over the leadership of the seminar. Many other refusenik scientists were able to leave Russia during the next two years, but not Mark Azbel. Agitation on his behalf was kept up in Britain, although we never had the organisational effectiveness to match the ...”