“... Bear Stearns in March, and took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in early September; as I write, more massive infusions of taxpayers’ money into the financial system are on the way.) The coincidence of the megasuccessful auction in London with the metafinancial disaster in New York is striking, and it makes a couple of things clear. First, while the ...”

“... by the maths master. In less than fifteen years, Vaughan – who had been a favourite pupil of Thomas Arnold at Rugby – transformed the school, spiritually, sanitarily and commercially. He raised money for a fashionable chapel by George Gilbert Scott as well as new boarding houses, decently appointed and, from the mid-1850s, complete with water ...”

“... would rise, year on year until 2035, to 43. An individual’s contributions also became marginally more expensive. Again, there were protests and stoppages, but battle-weariness had set in. Macron’s project, presented in January, reawakened the public’s resolve to fight it out. In addition to raising the retirement age by two years, the phased-in ...”

“... United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the ...”

“... are bodies in history. The history of the body always concerns someone who seems obviously both more embodied and more historical than you, like a medieval ascetic, or Emily Ratajkowski. But the fact that your own ordinary body is a product of history becomes unforgettable during birth. You are reminded that, were it not ...”

“... exposing scratched markings that looked like ears of wheat – symbols of hunger, perhaps, but more likely fletched arrows, reminders of attacks on the Jamestown stockade or a nod to Archer’s name. A micro-CT scan revealed two fragments of a tiny lead flask inside and some bone splinters, which when 3D-printed appeared to be human. The flask was clearly ...”

“... Few places​ celebrated the Restoration in 1660 with more enthusiasm than Sherborne in Dorset. It was late May, and crowds piled into the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic ...”

“... and races were staged with unprecedented intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic ...”

“... on the other hand, seems to say: We are alone, you and I. Writing and print are messengers. No more than that. A true text can have many manifestations, do not bother too much about the livery of the messenger. When, now and again, an author does allude to the look of a page (Lewis Carroll’s ‘Mouse’s Tale’, Sterne’s marbled interfoliations) it is ...”

“... was MacNeice’s master, put it all in two lines: Man is in love, and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say? In Yeats’s case there was a lot more to say, but in MacNeice’s not much. Because there was nothing more to say, MacNeice’s poems have an insistently dark side to ...”

“... universe (light, electricity, nervous energy etc), his deductive theory of which never saw print. More usefully, it was also in Egypt that he had the first glimmerings of what would become his philosophie anatomique: a grand scheme to demonstrate the fundamental structural unity of all animals. Initially, the goal was a modest one. Geoffroy attempted to show ...”

“... George IV had ‘never seriously inspired anyone with attachment’. Later observers viewed him no more favourably, Thackeray catching the prevailing flavour in 1855 and fixing it for future generations in his brilliant essay in The Four Georges. The 20th century has seen several biographies of the last of the four, much the best of which is Christopher ...”

“... is that her intellect was formed early in her life, but to establish the point would take a deal more exploration of the discernible intellectual influences than the professor provides. It would take more than exploration to explain the professor’s remark that by 1801 the ‘London smart set had followed the Prince ...”

“... of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment’). The writing of an ‘Ode to Duty’ shows how much the poet ...”

“... British politics before Thatcher (Sweetness and Light?). Many such lost causes pass unlamented – more likely to be powdered into dry-as-dust dissertations than instant coffee-table books. We know too much about them to regard their passing with unequivocal regret. But elsewhere, the plague of nostalgia rages with ferocious and seemingly incurable vigour, as ...”