“... depicted next to skyscrapers, like children backing up to yardsticks to be measur ed. And, like James Joyce’s measurement of eternity through the metaphor of the bird pecking away at the enormous mountain, this is a religious viewpoint, designed to make us realise how small we are. The corollary element of smallness in time, extinction, also reminds us of ...”

“... writers, much more than public servants and scientists, were the chief beneficiaries of the annual grant of £1200. Among them were several distinctly uncommon writers – Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. But the grounds on which awards were made were erratic. Disraeli pensioned the widow of Byron’s gondolier (it did not hurt that she had once been ...”

“... good, but ‘forsaking all others for the time being’ somehow just doesn’t have the same King James ring to it. That is, however, the point. Garber adroitly tacks back and forth between two complementary truths: that our sexuality is defined by the sum of our feelings and relationships at any single moment, and by actions and desires diffused throughout ...”

“... Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent biographies, this one ...”

“... theatre in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles ...”

“... been the assistant of a Viennese physical chemist whose work Bragg thought well of. In 1942, James Chadwick, though well aware of Nunn May’s Communism, recruited him over the hesitations of the security people to the ‘Tube Alloys’ (atom-bomb) project, as a first-class British member of Halban and Kowarski’s ‘heavy water’ team of solidly ...”

“... the Theban walls. Given that Polyneices has declared himself an enemy of Thebes, the decision to grant him honorific burial or not is intensely political. But the stand-off between Creon and Antigone is so framed as to question whether the disposal of Polyneices’ remains is only political, or falls under a higher law. Polyneices dies trying to assert his ...”

“... in charge at home as queen regent. She took to the role with panache: when the Scottish King James IV tried to exploit Henry’s absence by declaring war, Catherine revealed a decisive gift for organisation, masterminding the equipping and dispatch of English forces north. She even commissioned a jewelled armoured helmet and set out for Scotland ...”

“... who could be adequately characterised as a scribe. To be fair to Toorn’s hypothesis, one must grant that this narrative does not exhibit in all respects the kind of indelible authorial signature we are accustomed to in modern literature. Stylistically, it is not readily distinguished from the Hebrew prose of J or E (the Pentateuchal strand that favours ...”

“... epigenetics faded from view. With​ the discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in the 1950s, there was a renewed conviction among biologists – especially the physicists and engineers turned biologists like Crick – that what was needed was a ruthless reductionism. It was immediately recognised that DNA’s helical structure ...”

“... and the Hanoverian accession in 1714. With the defeat of Catholic supporters of the deposed James II in Ireland – then a subordinate kingdom belonging to England – in 1690, sectarian divisions, which foreshadow the differences between today’s Ulster unionists and Irish nationalists, became more deeply entrenched. Gibraltar was acquired in 1704 ...”

“... of First Cities led to new opportunities. In 1968 the National Endowment for the Arts provided a grant for a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Tougaloo, known for its role in the civil rights movement, had been rocked by protests the year before Lorde arrived, which may have influenced the panel’s choice of poet. But if she was selected ...”

“... stability, healing. Now this incompatibility contributed to a constitutional maelstrom. The Quaker James Nayler entered Bristol seated on an ass, reimagining Christ’s entry to Jerusalem. It was a clear case of blasphemy. But Parliament’s brutal means of punishing him – with whipping, bodily mutilation and perpetual imprisonment – was retrogressive: it ...”

“... Workers’ control of production had scarcely begun when the Commune fell. Although it failed to grant women the vote, several outstanding feminists were prominent in the Commune, which took action to promote equality in pay and pensions. ‘Women had been involved with the establishment of the Commune through politicised clubs and unions,’ Forster ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most ...”