“... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the ...”

“... thing. I was just screaming. Listen to “a wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom”’ – a Little Richard vocal line (garbled) from ‘Tutti Frutti’. ‘Don’t get the therapy confused with the music.’ And what’s true (and ‘simple’ and ‘real’) of the voice is also true of the instrument: How do you rate yourself as a guitarist? Well, it ...”

“... animates – and sometimes enervates – the poems. Randall Jarrell once referred to his ‘cast-iron whimsy’, and noted that ‘we begin to read Frost, always, with the taste of “Birches” in our mouth – a taste a little brassy, a little sugary.’ The taste might have something to do with the poem’s pronouns. ‘Birches’ opens with the ...”

“... childhood as were the accessories that went with the sale of it: empty folded coalbags, a set of iron scales and a leather-aproned coalman as familiar in Armley, Leeds as they were across the water in Derry. I don’t remember our coalman being particularly tasty though I had dreams about him tramping through our spotless house in order, I suppose, to ravish ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has ...”

“... and the London Waste Ltd plant in particular, was investigated by the television journalist Richard Watson for Newsnight. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste was guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was ...”

“... serving mostly as an intelligence officer in Austria, where he debriefed refugees from behind the Iron Curtain. In 1952, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford to study modern languages. Again, he spied on his fellow students and friends, this time for MI5, adopting a ‘left-wing persona’ in order to identify the Burgesses and Macleans of the future. He ...”

“... have benefited most from the First and Second World Wars not taking place, but such is history’s iron law of unintended consequences. Curiously, Brooke pauses halfway through his own massive defence of George to sketch a very similar scenario, in which America becomes part of the Commonwealth and there is no First World War, no Hitler or Stalin. But unlike ...”

“... the greatest threat to the theatres was fire, and the new Drury Lane incorporated the first iron safety curtain, despite which it burned down in 1809. Sheridan, knowing he was ruined, watched from the pavement, drink in hand, remarking to a quizzical passer-by that a man could surely enjoy a glass of wine by his own fireside. He had also been, in a ...”

“... be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a codpiece is bewitched to ...”

“... coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet between 1788 and 1811 British pig-iron production multiplied by five. By the latter year more than 30 per cent of the British labour force was employed in manufacturing, mining and industry, and Britain’s industrial strength was a vital element in the alliance. Napoleon himself would probably ...”

“... some recent scepticism. New attention has been paid to the political ambiguity of the class, and Richard Hamilton has argued that the Nazi electoral base owed less to the petty-bourgeoisie and more to the bourgeoisie proper than previously assumed. He analysed electoral districts and also made imaginative use of voting returns from fashionable holiday ...”

“... But this is wrong. The word ‘physical’ is what is known as a ‘natural-kind’ term (like ‘iron’ or ‘water’), albeit of a highly general sort, and it’s generally allowed that we can be very wrong about the nature of anything denoted by a natural-kind term. So we may be very wrong about the physical. We can’t be sure we know the nature and ...”

“... designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ...”