“... in challenging the limits of existing technology. In 1959, long before he had won his Nobel Prize, Richard Feynman encouraged people to think small by offering a couple of prizes of his own: $1000 dollars for an electric motor which would fit into a cube with 1/64 of an inch sides, and another $1000 for a page of text 1/250,000th of its normal size, in a form ...”

“... of what I read, the manuscript would be snatched from my hands and torn to shreds.’ But no price was too high to pay. If the marriage was necessarily sterile, at least the books had been born. All Una’s emotional capital was invested in John’s genius. Michael Baker doesn’t claim to be a critic and therefore makes no attempt to decide whether her ...”

“... was the scion of a landowning family. He records much about the quality of local produce and the price of crops. At times he almost resembles Cobbett in his attention to such details, though he lacks the radical sympathies of the author of Rural Rides. When visiting Derbyshire in the summer of 1801, he encounters factory children returning from work in ...”

“... name. The bookseller scrutinised the inscription and sold me the book at the slightly inflated price of 100 Egyptian pounds (around £9). Sitting on the bus afterwards, I began to think about that dedication. The words ‘with admiration’ stuck out. It seemed an odd phrase for Nkrumah to have used. Could it be the Muhammad (or, as Nkrumah spelled ...”

“... entered the language and persisted even when Skelt’s, the biggest manufacturers, halved the price. It’s the title of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay in Memories and Portraits, in which he recalls his generation’s passion for toy theatres; the wait to save up for a new play and the agony of choosing just one from the stationer’s shop in ...”

“... suffers tremors. The Booker jury properly praised this novel for its linguistic daring, but the price is that Vernon, sure enough, does not always sound like a 15-year-old: ‘the certainty of our kid logic got washed away, leaving pebbles of anger and doubt that crack together with each new wave of emotion,’ Vernon recalls of his friendship with ...”

“... irreverence and – my old coinage – Austropathy should have been so obliging and meek. What price translation as a form of helping a choleric old man across the road? Well, if it is, he doesn’t get very far. I have never read translations by anyone with less idea of what’s going on in the original. Because it is a parallel text, I first went back to ...”

“... rid of them.’Consider the snail. ‘Snails are on the front line of extinction these days,’ Richard Taws writes, and it’s not just their stuff or their parents, but their existence as a species. Achatinella apexfulva, the Hawaiian tree snail, gave up the ghost on 1 January 2019. Maybe the loss of a few Fisher ...”

“... hearing their stories first hand. Eventually he was ‘stomped’ for his trouble, but at the price of a few broken bones gained the trust of the Angels, introducing them to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who invited them to Kesey’s La Honda ranch for a party that has since, in accounts by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and others, achieved mythic ...”

“... exhilaration was felt in Britain. Australians who had felt themselves to be in exile here, such as Richard Neville, the editor of Oz, hurried home to help with the crusade. Germaine Greer briefly ceased to knock her own country. Almost anything seemed possible. In three years, the dream collapsed, in circumstances that had a lasting effect. On 11 November 1975 ...”

“... that was activated by the German invasion of Poland. Had Churchill tried to start a peace-at-any-price Cabinet revolt, he would have merely repeated his father’s ruinous trajectory by being swiftly tossed out of the Government, the Party and his constituency. 3. Nor can it reasonably be argued that Churchill should have extracted Britain from the war after ...”

“... back to the days of the junta, later said that he had been open to voting for England, but his price would have been the return of the Falkland Islands. The official figure put on the cost of the FA bid was £21 million, which seemed an outrageous sum to squander on such a futile endeavour. Small change in the world of professional football, it would have ...”

“... all you had to do was state your fantastical intentions – Leeks (Blue Solaise), Leeks (King Richard), Nasturtium (Moonlight), Nasturtium (Whirlybird), Nasturtium (Canary Creeper) – and nature would take care of the rest. Guy’s income came mostly from the restaurant trade and the Union Square farmers’ market in New York. His specialities were dried ...”

“... would do nothing about it except to say that I could add the money I paid al-Qaida to the contract price.’ The emir was soon killed and his successor demanded that the protection money be increased to $1 million a month. The businessman refused to pay and one of his Iraqi employees was killed; he withdrew his Turkish staff and his equipment to ...”

“... unfair criticism: it couldn’t do this if the criticisms were aired. Is this confidentiality a price worth paying? One reason, the ‘instrumental’ reason, to undertake any particular procedure is that it may lead to a better outcome: hearing all sides of the story helps an inquiry to get the facts right. Another reason, the ‘intrinsic’ reason, is ...”