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“... years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.’ The station cut away to a weather report, and then to a swing band in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, playing, with numbing tediousness, a tango, ‘La Cumparsita’, sodden at half-tempo, followed by a ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wit, and already knowing everything there was to be known about films and quite definitely a man of the world.18 July. Not having a mortgage or being otherwise in hock to the bank I am not particularly perturbed when the governor of the Bank of England predicts a likely rise in the interest rate. What does bother me is that for no obvious reason that ...”

“... an important problem and to become apprenticed to a senior scientist. I was lucky as a young man to find both. The biochemist husband of a cousin of mine tipped me off about the importance of haemoglobin, the protein of the red blood cells, and I found a scientific father in the physicist W.L. Bragg, who taught me a lot and vouchsafed his great name to ...”

“... behind the familiar mild exterior. Nobody would impute any lack of psychic integrity in the man himself. True enough, he was a peculiarly self-contained person whose inner life was always opaque, even to his most intimate companions. But there was no harsh discontinuity or irreconcilable inconsistency in his temperament, and we have no reason to suppose ...”

“... on his arrival in Delhi in 1334, Ibn Battutah was given a mansion in the old quarter of Kila Ray Pithora, 2000 silver dinars as sarshushti (‘for washing his head’), an annual stipend of 5000 silver dinars, a robe of fine goathair, and ‘a thousand Indian pounds of flour, a thousand pounds of flesh-meat, and I cannot say how many pounds of ...”