“... even in Aspen, his home town, Ross was regarded as an oddball. Born in 1892, the son of an Irish silver-miner, he left school as early as he could. His aim was to become a newsman – he had worked on the local paper during his school holidays and caught the bug. His parents disapproved but even so they seem to have prepared him well. His mother, a frontier ...”

“... room, and lengthy speculations about the relationship between James Clerk Maxwell and his wife, Katherine, with whom he occasionally collaborated.Sen​ insists that to make decisions about electric cars, wind farms and nuclear energy requires a grasp of the scientific fundamentals. But why should a familiarity with Carnot cycles, Maxwell’s demon or ...”

“... the modernised one like Gielgud or Prince Charles. The same or very similar modernised texts in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s scholarly and accessible new edition seem perfectly presentable on their own, but in Vendler are often destabilised by their immediate adjacency to the Quarto texts. Duncan-Jones prints ‘And burn the long-lived Phoenix in her ...”

“... to exploit the atmospheric possibilities of colour as well as the relaxation of taboos, or that Katherine Schofield as Nana actually bared all, thereby introducing BBC 2 classic serials to an entirely new audience. The Year of the Sex Olympics was one of two striking cautionary tales (the other was Wine of India) in which Nigel Kneale used the imaginative ...”

“... are exchanged, but the value by which they are exchanged; the use of money is to buy goods, and silver while money is of no other use.’ Law proposed land – valued as a multiple of its annual rent – as the basis for a public issue of paper notes to Scotland’s lairds, based either on a notional proportion of each laird’s lands, or by mortgage or ...”

“... is unaccountable. Christmas roses, ‘the lovely buds like handfuls of snow’; ‘the powerful, silver-pawed cypress tree’; ‘In the silence, it seemed he could hear the panther-like dropping of infinite snow’; ‘the flat unfinished world running with foam and noise and silvery light, and a few gulls swinging like a half-born thought’. Yet Lawrence ...”

“... was ironical, for Waugh’s grand friends all thought it rubbish. Waugh told Ronnie Knox that Katherine Asquith ‘had detested the book to the end and beyond, and said the characters did not exist either in real life or faery,’ adding sadly that he had after all ‘grown up in Metroland, and didn’t know any other world except at secondhand or at a ...”

“... Buckingham renovated his homes at great expense and shared them with his wife, the heiress Lady Katherine Manners, daughter of the earl of Rutland. They had four children, three of whom survived. Buckingham invited Balthazar Gerbier, an architect and painter, into his household, and Gerbier began to amass an enviable collection of Italian and Dutch artworks ...”

“... be organised also includes people dressed in simulated buckram and taffeta and the gleaming mock-silver of property breastplates and crowns, all of them borrowed from the second-best wardrobe of the Royal Shakespeare Company in order to deck out students and members of local amateur dramatic societies as representative characters from each of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... the architect of the match, Thomas Cromwell, who is beheaded on the very day his king marries Katherine Howard, niece of Cromwell’s arch-enemy the reactionary Duke of Norfolk (who in Mantel’s version resembles an ungenial version of Sir Ector in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone). As Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, puts it in The Mirror and the ...”

“... of urban fear return with spectacular fury. ‘It’s conceivable that bin Laden et al have put a silver stake in the heart of the “downtown revival” in New York and elsewhere. The traditional central city . . . is not dead yet, but the pulse is weakening.’ Bender is particularly concerned about the dangers of political fragmentation and ...”

“... visit me. She was wearing a huge ring, made, she said, from a 14th-century Portuguese sailor’s silver buckle and an aquamarine which Ottoline Morrell (Henrietta called her ‘Ot’) had given to her grandmother, who had given it to her mother, who, Henrietta said, ‘found it in a drawer among dirty socks, put it in an envelope which she didn’t ...”

“... With its deliberate exploitation of the ‘uncanny’ link between a dangling climber and a silver monkey pendant, it strays into Poe’s territory. But ‘Running down’, the most substantial story in the collection, changes from an equally sober memoir of old university acquaintances into pure Frankenstein. The accident-prone undergraduate has become ...”

“... Everyone seemed to agree on the semiotic message given out by Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who appeared in Nancy Reaganesque red suits, blue eyeshadow and false eyelashes, and was roasted by the American press, with one especially cruel review from Robin Givhan in the Washington Post: ‘She took fashion – which speaks in ...”

“... the riots, people looked for the legacy of slavery in institutions and the arts. African gold and silver, clearly valuable, was displayed in museums, but why not homespun textiles or portraits by black artists? In Liverpool this led to gradual changes at the Walker Art Gallery, whose collection includes about three dozen Renaissance paintings once owned by ...”