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“... in Who do you think you are?), humorous essays, television plays. His TV adaptation of the John Fowles short story, ‘The Enigma’, was extremely skilful. To the general public he is probably best-known by virtue of the BBC serialisation of The History Man. This caused something of a stir a few years back, partly due to the excellence of the book ...”

“... Stores dividend slips, the club cards, her spare hair nets, small gold safety pins, and a St John’s Ambulance First Aid book.’ Or maybe in the couple of old, badly-mended lustre jugs hanging above? ‘In each you would find something interesting: a small roll of bandage, a coin, a hair clip, a bus ticket or a stub of pencil with a rubber in its end ...”

“... a wooden cupboard, about the size of a telephone box, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool – had been invented in 1940 by the eccentric Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for the purpose of improving its users’ ‘orgastic potency’ and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. It became fashionable in the 1950s and ...”

“... or dour corporate axeman about him. This wasn’t Ian MacGregor flying in to Thatcherise British Steel or tell the miners they weren’t working hard enough. He was a natural diplomat, consulting across the board before making his moves, always referring to Nissan as an equal partner, fluent in four languages, with a gift for the expansive gesture – along ...”

“... and ‘broadcast power around the entire planet’. In the spring of 1899 he secured $100,000 from John Jacob Astor IV (later the richest man to drown on the Titanic) for the development of a new lighting system. Disregarding Astor’s expressed intentions, Tesla spent it on moving his entire wireless-power operation to the mountain resort of Colorado ...”

“... says, ‘whether we had a right – any more than the French before us – to pursue by fire and steel in Indochina the objectives our leaders had chosen was a question that never occurred to me.’ His parents were professionals, of Russian Jewish ancestry but born in the US, and devout Christian Scientists. He went to Harvard on a full fellowship from the ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. Musical ...”

“... In January last year a directive from John Denham, secretary of state in what was then the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was going to be rethought.* The new system should ‘continue to incentivise research excellence’ and reward ‘the quality of researchers’ contribution to public policy-making and to public engagement ...”

“... Austrian family to seek his fortune in America but returned home to make it in the Austrian steel industry. He married Leopoldine Kalmus, the daughter of a wine merchant, but his father disapproved of the choice: ‘By blood she was half-Jewish and by faith a Roman Catholic, offending at a stroke his Protestant ethic and his anti-semitic ...”

“... of authenticity, along with exhaustively researched detail about guns, the properties of knife steel and the names of plants.) The jeans are worn by Martin, father of the protagonist, Julia, a 14-year-old girl who goes by Turtle. Martin – intelligent, narcissistic, an autodidact – has shunned the outside world, convinced he is better than everyone in ...”

“... in the crops, pulsing stones, dowsing, alien visitations, all that nostalgic revivalist froth. John Farrand Jr has called his lap-crushing picture book, very simply, Weather. The subject is, according to the blurb, ‘awe-inspiring and inescapable’. Photographs are the thing here, a spectacular portfolio, record sleeves of the right stuff, captured ...”

“... to any government in his lifetime. And then as the election approached there was Tebbit, what John Biffen called the ‘Raucous Tendency’ – ‘Dracula’, as he was more affectionately known in the Party – making a mess at Central Office and daring to hint at his coming succession. By the end of her second term, so often a risky time for a ...”

“... Francis Biddle, an aristocratic New Deal Democrat who had been Roosevelt’s Attorney-General, and John J. Parker, a US circuit court judge, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court in 1930 by President Hoover, but rejected by the Senate owing to opposition by labour and blacks. Although the Russians proposed that Biddle preside over the tribunal, he ...”

“... tanks after Kursk, for instance: ‘the crews splayed out beside them or interred within these steel tombs, mainly fragments of men in a horrifying litter of limbs, frying pans, shell cases, playing cards and stale bread’. How relevant is the Red Army’s victory to the present military balance in Europe? Some differences, usually ignored, are easy ...”