“... the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than intellectualising ...”

“... On 7 May 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville ...”

“... of air power was to ‘attack the will of the enemy’s people’. ‘Whatever the civilian may desire or squeak for, to put it vulgarly, in the next great war he is going to be “in the soup”, and what kind of soup will it be? A pretty hot one!’ It could plausibly be argued that the readiness of British statesmen to allow the dismemberment of ...”

“... ruling out the possibility that the spores of C. fraxinea, like the midges that carry Bluetongue, may well cover long distances in the right circumstances – a good breeze over a mass of warm water, between the Dutch coast and the coast of Suffolk, say. Finally the fungus is not easy to identify: it is a close relative, or possibly a pathogenic phase, of ...”

“... When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ignored by philosophers ...”

“... It’s hardly surprising that Sandy Arbuthnot falls for this sex goddess of espionage; even Richard Hannay is tempted: ‘I hated her instinctively, hated her intensely, but longed to arouse her interest.’ The idea of the vamp extracting secrets from hapless men is old, but took on a ” new life during the First World War, when spy fever raged. Tammy ...”

“... and tides, planets and pendulums by celestial law and geometrical order. However surprising it may seem, even the English title, ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, was, according to Newton, designed to help the book sell. Long before scientific popularisation became the common salvation of hard-pressed publishers, Newtonianism spawned ...”

“... to Moscow and back and was the only plane with the proven ability to deliver an atomic bomb. This may well have been decisive in persuading Stalin to back down. It was the world’s first example of nuclear diplomacy – and it worked. More important than Bevin’s amour-propre was a constant worry about American unreliability. ‘The Americans,’ according ...”

“... Scott back in Northampton. This time his movements after discharge cannot be fully traced. But in May 1897 he lay dying, with horrible irony, in Sir Gilbert’s Midland Hotel, St Pancras. Here his children were just in time to see him before he succumbed, of ‘acute cirrhosis of liver and heart disease’. From this unhappy story, Stamp singles out two ...”

“... man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of stubborn, bossy New England individualists. Even the Fuller family cow was ‘tyrannical’, Nathaniel Hawthorne once complained. (Hawthorne was a friend of Bucky’s ...”

“... his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show. The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ...”

“... boy’. In the popular estimation he probably outranks Bad King John and Wicked King Richard III as the worst ever English king. He has this terrible reputation largely because of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This composite work is thought to have been first compiled in the 890s under the auspices of King Alfred, then copied and continued in ...”

“... to be more powerful than kings.’The cacophony of voices in McPhee’s book recalls the work of Richard Cobb; it shows a similar sensitivity to regional variation and delight in anarchic individualism. McPhee offsets popular devotion to the revolution with evidence of apathy, frustration and profanity. ‘Vive le roi! The republic can get fucked,’ one ...”

“... jacket and white foustanella, hand on hip, legs apart, a scimitar at his side. This is Major Richard Church of the British-funded 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry, as painted in 1813 by Denis Dighton. At the time, he was commanding Greek soldiers he had recruited to fight against Napoleon. He subsequently left the British army and, after a stint as the ...”

“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”