“... as he waits in vain for an audience with the chairman of Gosplan – with a detailed X-ray close-up of Lebedev’s cancerous lungs: ‘A drifting, tumbling molecule of benzopyrene … sails into the cell’s bulging curtain wall of fats and sticks there, like an insect caught in glue; then, worse, is dragged through, because the fat curtain is ...”

“... is the dust of war; al-khayda‘a, the dust of a battle. Al-‘ithyar, the dust of feet.’ Man is a microcosm of this sublime universe, as Book II, ‘On the Human Being’, conveys. The human has 360 bones and 360 veins, one for each day of the year. His faculty of reason ‘is analogous to the moon’, al-Nuwayri informs us, ‘because it waxes and ...”

“... and punctilio; life was no more than an inventory of small choices that together formed a man’s character, entire.With this went an Edwardian English accent and vocabulary not quite phoney enough to be easily spotted.No wonder Arthur was nicknamed Duke by the rich young Wasps who were his playfellows. Quite soon he turned into a Wasp ...”

“... where his pictures show the influence and the quirky humanity of Cartier-Bresson, Satyajit Ray and, indeed, the sort of aesthetic that Calcutta itself had represented for a century and a half, one concerned with uncovering, through a Modernist paradox, the intimate and the natural in urban disrepair and industrial decay, with recuperating the secretly ...”

“... being called ‘Bogie’ by people he’d never meet. But he’d only just made it. He was a moody man, a depressive and a needler and often a mean drunk. There was a bitterness at his core: he resented being born on Christmas Day and missing the bounty of a birthday; he reckoned his well-to-do parents didn’t love him enough; he’d had three marriages and ...”

“... evidence of its double-helical structure. But it was an entirely different matter to obtain X-ray crystallographic images at a high enough level of resolution to discover the atom-by-atom three-dimensional structure of complex biological molecules such as proteins. Proteins are very large, irregularly shaped, floppy molecules. Arranging the physical ...”

“... in early Welsh). From the 2700-foot summit of the Merrick, on a clear day, you can see the Isle of Man to the south, once a hornet’s nest of Viking raiders (though Manx is a Q-Celtic language), and to the north Dumbarton Rock, ‘the dun or fortress of the Britains’, stronghold of the linguistically British or P-Celtic Kingdom of ...”

“... that it had been tampered with. At the close of play the Chairman of the England Selectors, Ray Illingworth, examined Atherton’s trousers. Shortly thereafter, Atherton took his trousers, along with England team manager Keith Fletcher, to a meeting with the match referee Peter Burge, reputedly a stickler for discipline. After a two-hour meeting Burge ...”

“... political leaders of the world (Mrs Thatcher retaliated with what Geldof describes as ‘her death-ray glare’). It is an exciting story, well told. Bob Geldof the man is interesting enough. The ‘Bob Geldof phenomenon’ is even more so. The public response to the extraordinary events organised by that ‘fanatic ...”

“... will fulfil any of those offices Your Majesty might grant him because he is an able and competent man and deserving of Your Majesty’s favour and because his wish is to continue to serve Your Majesty always and to end his life as his forbears have, for in it he will receive great favour and reward. Scribbled above Cervantes’s signature is a notation by a ...”

“... in the water. And watching what remained of him disappear downstream, I thought of the masked man riding off at the end of that cowboy show I watched as a boy: ‘A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty Hi-Yo Silver! The Lone Ranger!’ There goes Hughey now, I thought, the lone ranger, a cloud of dust, hi-yo silver. The ...”

“... the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not.’ Abishag’s job was to keep the old man warm and moist, which the mere nearness of her youthful breath might do. She lay in his bosom to extend not his member but his life. Into modern times, doctors prescribed ‘Shunamitism’ for just that purpose. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon approved ...”

“... dancing every week, if she didn’t have a shift – Maureen had been followed off the bus by a man who then stalked her all the way to her front door, lingering outside even as she slipped off her shoes in the hallway. It was with this in mind that she accepted Keith for the last dance of the evening, knowing he would be obliged to escort her home ...”

“... beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away: Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair,  Ray round with flames her disk of seed,  And many a rose-carnation feed With summer spice the humming air ... As year by year the labourer tills  His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;  And year by year our memory fades From all the circle of the hills. What ...”

“... 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar: I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain ...”