“... in Aurora, Texas, and the recovery of not quite human bodies from the wreckage – and in which a young H.G. Wells forged the myths and obsessions of modern sci-fi. In Carlson’s eyes, Tesla’s relationship with modernity in all its forms – its fixation with progress and explanation, capital and connection, but also its fragmentation of narrative and the ...”

“... and tyranny’, he wrote in 1783, the American language should allow new usages to reflect its young and vigorous political institutions. Later, he became obsessed with the ‘disorder’ of American politics and language. By 1824, he was advocating linguistic identity with Britain. Lawson-Peebles’s most extensive and interesting exploration of his theme ...”

“... best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little kindness, but now and then it proved a wise ...”

“... rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis ...”

“... John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits. At the time, the play and its message were anatomised ...”

“... but the tens of thousands more who registered to vote for him and the others, many of them young, who will be gathered up by his network of campaigners in the next months and years – the paper will remain cut off from Labour, and from a new generation of potential readers. For the moment, it is adrift. Toynbee’s latest word on Corbyn is that with ...”

“... North Korea or India or Pakistan to give up its nuclear weapons is hypocritical. In any case, as Kenneth Waltz asked in a well-known paper from 1981, who’s to say that a nuclear-free world would necessarily be more stable than a world with one nuclear power? Or that a world with one nuclear power is more stable than one with two, or a world with two more ...”

“... a Picture Post feature entitled ‘Big City Loneliness’, a state exacerbated on Sundays, was the young Katharine Whitehorn, described by Nead as ‘a journalist who went on to work for Picture Post’, which is a bizarrely emaciated description of one of the most celebrated journalists of her era. The reliance on Picture Post as a point of reference is both ...”

“... to rhetoric and the prosaic presentation has a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture ...”

“... published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is attractive about Powell, and a good deal of what makes his compatriots occasionally shy away from ...”

“... Ottoman Empire. In 1912, Gulbenkian set up the Turkish Petroleum Company, its name inspired by the Young Turk rebellion against Sultan Abdülhamid II. Shareholders in the company included Royal Dutch Shell (whose merger he had helped arrange five years earlier), Anglo-Persian (later BP) and Deutsche Bank; Gulbenkian reserved for himself the five per cent share ...”

“... Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The ...”

“... Among those here castigated for snobbery and irrationality are Jeanette Winterson, Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark. The last-named is treated with particular severity because he had such power to impose his false opinions on the world. For example, he had much influence on the decision, in 1939, to store the paintings from the National Gallery in Welsh slate ...”

“... bizarre to go early one morning to look at the nondescript and wholly undefended villa from which Kenneth Bigley, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley had just been kidnapped by ten masked men. Could they have taken seriously the line pumped out by the White House and Downing Street that the dangers of Iraq were being exaggerated by the media? They behaved as if ...”

“... their own benefit. None of these, though, is representative of his profession – and only people young enough to be cynical believe them to be so. The number of dishonest scientists cannot, of course, be known, but even if they were common enough to justify scary talk of ‘tips of icebergs’ they have not been so numerous as to prevent science’s having ...”