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“... waging it, and there are women, too, sometimes centre-stage though more often in the background. Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle are the mini-masterpieces I remember from school; this century, Antony Beevor, Max Hastings and Holland have led the British pack. The history of war is now certainly more ...”

“... symptoms in 1872; Parkinson (James) got his tremor in 1817 and soon thereafter the great anatomist Charles Bell, whom Darwin admired, could be even more precise about ‘his’ disorder – Bell’s palsy – of the seventh cranial nerve; Alzheimer’s disease after Alois of early 20th-century Munich; Gilles de la Tourette’s impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s ...”

“... of scientists, almost all of whom had studied or taught at Cambridge. Williams was proposed by Martin Folkes, a young polymath, just a few years older than Williams himself and particularly distinguished in mathematics and astronomy. Also present were Folkes’s close collaborator Robert Smith, another youthful mathematical prodigy, who had just been ...”

“... of industrialists and entrepreneurs in both time and space. Thus its leading exponent, Martin Wiener, in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, quotes Cobden’s dismay in 1863: ‘we have the spirit of feudalism rife and rampant in the midst of the antagonistic development of the age of Watt, Arkwright and ...”

“... recognises the influence of external, social factors in the theories and practices of psychiatry. Martin Stone’s piece on the impact of shell-shock on British psychiatry provides further evidence against the view that changes in psychiatric theory and practice reflect the relentless progress of scientific knowledge. He argues that shell-shock played a major ...”

“... of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice. They outpolled Adams and his running mate, Charles Pinckney, but in order for Jefferson to become president, one or more Republican electors had to avoid voting for Burr. They failed to get the message. Jefferson and Burr both ended up with 73 electoral votes, sending the contest to the House of ...”

“... as Steve Jobs’s last word being ‘Wow!’ At the funeral Obama delivered a speech, Chris Martin of Coldplay sang ‘Til Kingdom Come’, and Beau and Hunter’s sister, Ashley, quoted from Beau’s ‘theme song’, the New Radicals’ ‘You Get What You Give.’ Hunter delivered his own eulogy: I retold the story about Beau holding my hand when ...”

“... watch, monitoring their performance over weeks and months in the royal closet at Whitehall. Charles II had time for repeated discussions with this physically ill-favoured, socially maladroit and reputedly malodorous mechanic because he understood very well what such an invention was worth, and, accordingly, what mechanics who could deliver such goods ...”

“... corporal form the body and blood of Christ during this service? The pope said yes – and so did Martin Luther. The Reformed said no: bread and wine were symbols of body and blood, and symbols they remained in this service. There was still much to discuss if one took this line, but the great gulf between the Reformed on the one hand, and both Lutherans and ...”

“... devotion to the Dominican Order, for example), but in 1540 he also made a copy of a portrait of Martin Luther. Maybe we should not make too much of this, since there is no evidence that he was personally ready to go over to Luther’s side. But it is possible that, before Luther’s word became dangerous, he embodied it in one of his works. It is worth ...”

“... it came to amending the law the judges had challenged. Instead, the Commons discussed it – once Charles Clarke and his opposite number, David Davis, had stopped talking – for a grand total of 80 minutes. Oh well. To return to the question of how things got to be like this, we have to accept the plain fact that ideologically speaking, there is no ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... to end,’ the gung-ho Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall says in the film. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) later repeats the line, thinking how happy the young men travelling upriver with him will be when that day comes, and they can go home. ‘The trouble is,’ Willard adds, ‘I had been back there, and I knew it just didn’t exist any more.’ The ...”

“... She was both admired and loved by her peers and counted among her closest friends at the magazine Charles Addams, Brendan Gill, William Maxwell (who edited her stories for twenty years, and who has written the Introduction to a reissued collection, The Springs of Affection) and Joseph Mitchell – as well as Shawn himself. They loved to listen to her because ...”

“... of the Free City of Danzig in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very ...”