“... black fellow knows how to spell his name. Then we see two slave-drivers on horseback herding a small group of shackled men across the rocks and into a forest. It’s getting cold, the men have thin blankets, their breath freezes in the air. The procession pauses when a light appears among the trees, perched on an improbable cart waving a giant tooth above ...”

“... velocities, as well as very strong gravitational fields), quantum theory (associated with the very small), and quantum gravity (applicable only in extreme circumstances, such as those obtaining in the early universe or at the end of the life of a collapsing star). Each is associated with particular mathematical concepts, and in many ways the prime problem for ...”

“... event in the official national calendar gather for a cup of tea in the Georgian town hall of a small market town in the West Midlands. There is a great deal of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of ...”

“... eye and look at it. The camera will never know the difference.”’ Because Lorre was also rather small and chubby (though his weight fluctuated wildly), at least one film writer of the 1930s thought him Buddha-like – a ‘Buddha contemplating the mysteries and miseries of the human soul’. This is all wrong. Lorre’s eyes were far too animated: too ...”

“... people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold presence in human life and ...”

“... his accommodation no more at this moment than he would in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming ...”

“... a barricade, too broken-backed to shoulder the great historical tasks assigned them? If so, men small wonder that Marx ended up turning to an ‘inhuman’ revolutionary force to reoccupy the place disappointingly vacated by a human one. Entertaining and irresistible speculations of this sort can be deeply misleading, however, especially if they distract ...”

“... to publish her first big book, the 1990 novel The trick is to keep breathing, with Polygon, the small publisher of which Edinburgh Review is a part. It is conventional, when discussing ‘the new Glasgow writing’, a movement taken to involve man of pairts Alasdair Gray and poet Tom Leonard as well as Kelman and Galloway, to open on a sort of pen-Polaroid ...”

“... eyes suggesting mystic withdrawal. Its grossness, in profile, makes one think of a cow. But when small boys or bored askaris tease it, it is transformed, it is doglike. One takes evasive action as it sprints past to pose, ears cocked horizontally, staring at its persecutors, on the bank by the clubhouse steps; one expects it to bark. It is said that, before ...”

“... Sillars, the other central figure in the book is the SNP’s onetime guru-in-chief, the late Stephen Maxwell, whose name is largely unknown even to those who follow Scottish politics. Nobody did more than Maxwell to formulate the now dominant idea of left-wing nationalism. As late as 1982, Alex Salmond and other members of the Maxwellite 79 Group were ...”

“... as entitled to stick up for its vital interests as the largest. If there were to be vetos, then small states should have them too. Of course this ideal was moderated by reality. But this was a Europe which, as a Danish foreign minister later observed, was designed to make the continent safe for small nations. In the ...”

“... boring world. Most of what is known in popular culture about Gypsy comes from the musical that Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents made out of her 1957 memoirs, and most of that is about the original momager, Rose Hovick. It’s a showbiz story about a hard-driving mother and the daughters she drives away. It’s still performed all the time, endlessly ...”

“... a juvenile sensationist with enthusiasms and ideas as quick and darting as the movement of his small feet across open grass. And all the while, the hum of his parents’ crack-up presses its way into his head. No previous character of Doyle’s has had this degree of interior life, nor anything like Paddy’s capacity for wonder. Not that Doyle’s ...”

“... reviewed to books published. But that won’t happen. Most books will remain unnoticed; the same small number will be reviewed, for a while, in a larger number of places. In all too many of these places there will simply be more of the customary rubbishing and rave. Few people can be looking forward to the dawn of a new respect for the judgments purveyed by ...”

“... life which combines both pride (one scene takes us on a detour to Cary Grant’s birthplace) and small-mindedness. I especially liked the DIY assistant who, on being told that her work colleague has just brutally murdered her husband, replies: ‘I always said she had a hard little face.’ Stevenson’s novel must be regarded as an interesting hybrid rather ...”