“... explanation, and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though they know better.’ Stephen King’s new novel, 11.22.63, combines a variety of genres, being a JFK assassination thriller, a story of time travel, a variation on the grail quest, a novel of voyeurism, a love story, a historical novel, a counterfactual historical novel, and the ...”

“... rarely calls to talk about my research. In April, however, she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I agreed ...”

“... promote its interests. Researching his biography of Elizabeth I’s chief adviser Lord Burghley, Stephen Alford discovered a scribbled memo from 1562, written while the queen lay dangerously ill with smallpox, ordering the privy council to appoint a successor in the event of her death. Elizabeth recovered, but it was still a revolutionary moment – the ...”

“... with parked cars at night. The only difference from England is that nearly all the cars are on the small side – say, Escort-type. As I drive a Fiesta, I applaud the common sense of the Hungarians. Hungary still has all the marks of a proud traditional state. It has an uninterrupted history for almost a thousand years. The actual date of foundation is ...”

“... of boys as the wary or daring young animal grows up. His present biographer mentions that Reid’s small feet had high insteps, which – to me, at any rate – suggests someone capable of springing into some other air. I had not noticed his feet, nor did I know that this lonely and engaging man was a pederast – one who found the homosexual and heterosexual ...”

“... has sounded a discordant and unusual note among writers on Victorian England. She defended a (small c) ‘conservative’ perspective long before conservatism became intellectually fashionable. She was deciphering ‘ideas in context’ more than a decade before such an approach became the new orthodoxy of academic journals: indeed, her stock-in-trade has ...”

“... smartness. Inspecting the Queen Mary, in 1936, she was not only miffed at the inappropriately small room in which her large panel had been placed, but, to quote Frances Spalding, ‘marvelled at its effective line in slick vulgarity and took particular dislike to the extensive reliefs, painted a sham gold and silver with metallic varnish’. It is ironic ...”

“... so-called ‘Noah’s Ark’ school, whose adherents contend that all modern humans descend from a small population of fully modern humans living in Africa around 200,000 years ago. These people spread throughout the world, reaching the Levant 90,000 years ago, Australia around 60,000 years ago, and Europe 40,000 years ago. Indigenous populations were quickly ...”

“... In Shirley Jackson’s best-known story, ‘The Lottery’, the residents of a small New England village get together on a summer morning to draw lots. The sun shines, the children play, the villagers chat: it takes a few pages to figure out that they’re deciding who should be stoned to death this year. The New Yorker published the story in 1948, and got more calls and letters and cancelled subscriptions than ever before or since ...”

“... explanation will suffice. ‘Cumulative selection’, the building-up of large effects in many small stages, is the key to the problem of good design. Small, advantageous genetic changes, each in isolation highly probable, are preserved as they arise, and gradually accumulate to the point where they constitute vastly ...”

“... Henry II sought to limit ecclesiastical privileges, which had expanded under his predecessor, Stephen of Blois (1135-54), and to re-establish royal authority in the kingdom. To do so, it was necessary ‘to recollect and carefully write down’ the ‘ancient customs’ that had governed the law during the reign of Henry I (1100-35). Only in January ...”

“... would provide props and costumes, dress up or undress, and pose for the pictures that betray her small-town puritan husband’s penchant for spying on the female form. Often they would quarrel, as Hopper, very much the late Victorian male, repaid her support and collaboration by disparaging and discouraging her own artistic output. Childless when they died ...”

“... and early 19th centuries is now both ubiquitous and invisible, so in a sense it always was. As Stephen Deuchar shows in his impressive account of 18th-century sporting art, we know very little about almost all the artists who produced it. The names of some are known to us only through their pictures; of others, we know their names but nothing by them; of ...”

“... and Post-Impressionist pictures, Wilson relied on advance payments to the Parisian dealers Stephen Higgons and his wife, who obtained paintings from other dealers and runners who wanted immediate payment. The full extent of the Higgons account was concealed from the firm’s financial director. Then, during the mid-Seventies, there was a row with the ...”

“... familiar texts in a new light. One of the anthology’s most dense introductory essays, on the ‘small compass and tight formal constraints’ of the sonnet, could apply equally well to its own powers of compression. Rule-bound and page-limited – Simon Rae’s introduction to News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems compares editing an anthology to ...”