“... of the Unfamiliar, and she could picture Dot touching the waves with an iron sceptre.’ Dot is wearing an ugly but ‘plantlike’ dress on which the other candidates for queenship are described as ‘feasting their eyes’. There has been a drought in the Argus region, and as Wallace puts it, ‘we needed a kind rain, a blessing rain.’ Dot contrives to ...”

“... for calculating planetary positions, the latter for describing the physical universe.) Thanks to David Wootton’s careful reconstruction of the writing and printing of the Sidereus (in an article in Issue 6 of Galilaeana: Journal of Galilean Studies), we now know that Galileo’s swaggering pro-Copernicanism, the least plausible of the rival models to most ...”

“... five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie. Two hundred years after his birth into slavery, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and writer once described as ‘an ornament to society and a blessing to his race’, looms munificently over the city he visited during a ...”

“... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...”

“... marker-penned slogans, or doodles, or quotes from Goethe; a sinister ballpoint-pen portrait of David Cameron and cards written by solicitors Birnberg Peirce explaining that you don’t need to give your name if searched. The walls are a sort of slogan competition, in the manner of a JCR suggestion book or a library toilet wall: which ones will last? In the ...”

“... and that I could expect a visit. My interrogator was in his mid-fifties, tall, well-spoken, and wearing a long dark overcoat which he didn’t take off. He sat down with his laptop and I made him a cup of tea. I don’t remember much else about our encounter, except that his questions seemed to go on for ever and that I was anxious to please. The General ...”

“... for its innovations and its geniuses and scoff at it for thinking it invented human nature. (David Hume, late of that parish, invented human understanding, or a treatise of that name, and that’s quite different.) Meanwhile, we can love Glasgow for its rebel spirit and its demotic energy while noting the piousness of Bearsden and Milngavie. Scotland ...”

“... in Retrographic, colourised by Mads Madsen, is of the scaffold: Powell, who looks to be wearing the same outfit as on the Saugus, is stood in his socks, his legs bound, a hood over his head; a man in a brown hat, shaded by one of several umbrellas, is adjusting the noose. Powell’s co-conspirators, George Atzerodt and ...”

“... Ernst, a friend of Boué’s, he met the Surrealist poets and painters, and with Herbert Read and David Gascoyne, introduced Surrealism to England. He helped persuade Picasso (it didn’t take much) to contribute to the 1936 exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in Piccadilly, which launched the movement in Britain. As Penrose tells it, Eluard had taken ...”

“... posh, adorns the front and back covers of the March issue of British Vogue. On the front, she’s wearing a chiffon crepon dress by Gucci – a semi-see-through affair with cartoon-effect sequined appliqué collar, ruffles, epaulettes and bow. She’s lying on a pink and gold brocade sofa, half-smiling and biting her thumb. On the back she’s advertising ...”

“... cold enough that I won’t enjoy it.’ ‘And you’re going to have a shower wearing your spectacles?’ He took them off and laughed. ‘I put them on to think.’ ‘What were you thinking?’ Without answering, he went into the bathroom. There was a yellowish mucus, which seemed to have a yellowish matter in it, around the orifice of ...”

“... she compared her parents to a snow-covered rose outside the window: ‘a survivor wearing a cap of snow askew on its bowed head’. ‘It was not a particularly apt metaphor,’ she later conceded, ‘but I was wonderfully proud of it.’ And she should have been. The committee soon found sponsors, visas and jobs for her ...”

“... a silent carriage for the journey home; bruises earned fighting off the kind of men who insist on wearing riding boots in bed. The ‘bad’ Bembo cousin, Wilfred, reinvented as Billy Baxter, spurns provincialism and becomes a radio comedian, a personality. A fruit-eater. A roadside sex pest, a killer. Giles Doughty (Binding names with relish, as if he were ...”

“... The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza – then chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, then established Phillips de Pury, which he ...”

“... have to hold my breath for fear of infecting the people who come near me.’ A view shared by David Gascoyne (with whom she was briefly in love, she nearly 40, he not yet 20), who wrote: ‘On the whole, I think her influence on the people she comes in contact with is bad ... There are very few who can stand the dazzling (but how depressing!) light of ...”