“... leaves a conscientious biographer in a bit of a pickle. What to do with a subject – especially a major historical subject – who seems to lack a grown-up interior life? Who offers little but stagey poses, a hand languidly flung to brow, or a lot of specious business with a handkerchief? A century on, it’s as if Bernhardt were still daring us to make sense ...”

“... Bellow was bigger game. With Bellow, Atlas was climbing up to the high diving board, essaying a major artist – one still foxily alert and alive, whose reputation had just enjoyed a late-stage booster shot with the publication of Ravelstein – and sunning in his hero’s reflected glory. Atlas and Bellow had much in common: Chicago, Jewishness, an ...”

“... tank in his name. Menachem Begin’s election in 1977, which brought Likud to power and heralded a major realignment in Israeli politics in the right’s favour, should have improved his prospects. But Begin, the former commander of the Irgun militia and a Jabotinsky follower, considered Bibi’s father ‘a pompous windbag who had preferred a comfortable life ...”

“... that the natural harbour at the mouth of the Johor River had two centuries earlier served as a major port for the sultanate of Johor (and before that as trading post for the Java-based Majapahit empire). Singapore, the port on the Johor River, was not his first choice for an experiment in enlightened colonial rule – he would have preferred to inherit ...”

“... with the prevailing winds when it came to Mao. This put him in a tight spot during the first major purge of the People’s Republic era, which targeted Xi’s old mentor from the north-west, Gao Gang. In 1953, Gao was purged, in part as a result of Deng and Zhou’s machinations. After his subsequent suicide, Mao became convinced that Gao had been a ...”

“... of the high philology of the humanists as a record of the high art of Renaissance social life. The major single piece of progress has consisted in a documentary discovery made by John Shearman and Webster Smith. They showed that the painting originally hung not in the villa of Castello, which belonged after 1477 or 1478 to ...”

“... and urban scene of the Eighties, whose humour can make one wince, and the energy and wit of the major plot development that follows. Its climax, before the earth is extinguished, is the idyll in which reason becomes sexually incarnate, as the heroine lakes the star-captive into her arms – in the eden of a park ‘landscaped in the 1740s’, and ‘made ...”

“... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...”

“... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What ...”

“... different requirements for entry, and boys and girls spent their days travelling for interviews. John Morrison, the tutor of Trinity, tried to get the colleges to agree to a uniform procedure, but Armitage of Queen’s and Pratt of Christ’s fought him until the establishment of UCCA forced Cambridge to take its head out of the sand. Another reason was ...”

“... identical versions of a pamphlet published in 1715. The grounds for allocating these items to John Oldmixon took many pages to set out, and include both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite ...”

“... that a fair number of Gould’s contemporaries-Vladimir Horowitz, Gary Grafman, Leon Fleisher, John Ogdon, to mention a few of the most gifted – succumbed to mysterious illnesses and had to curtail appearances and whole careers. The extremity of being out there alone, day after day, sooner or later catches up with one, especially if, as in Gould’s ...”

“... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...”

“... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...”

“... that the SA was generally more successful than the Nazi Party in recruiting workers, especially in major urban areas. There we find a significant level of switchovers between Brownshirts and Communists through the depression years. In 1933 the SA would have included both those who had joined out of a vaguely articulated working-class bitterness, and ...”