“... countryside, knew little about the industrial working class. I found myself surrounded by miners, steel-workers and labourers, who had never possessed pyjamas, who when they spoke of ‘books’ meant the Dandy or the Beano, and whose conversation was an unbroken stream of obscenity. The gloom was leavened only by the banal pop songs of the day, sung ...”

“... there on the monitor: that bobbing dark yolk, fringed by wriggling capillaries and the stainless steel of the speculum that holds her lids apart. I’m down the corridor from the operating theatre, waiting to drive her home with her patch and new lens. On the live action screen, I watch a scalpel take aim at her pupil and pierce the cornea at a point on its ...”

“... physicians and their apothecaries was often close, and could be corrupt: Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower wrote of how the crooked double act of apothecary and physician could devise rip-offs a hundred times more dastardly than either could manage alone. The modern version of such practices is rampant in today’s private healthcare market; I have known ...”

“... Valmara jump into the air to about waist height – where a larger charge explodes and sprays 1200 steel fragments at high velocity in all directions. ‘I defuse the mine with a piece of wire,’ explained Sabir Saleh, a middle-aged villager who went into the minefields every day. ‘Then I unscrew the top and take out the aluminium around the ...”

“... be not much greater than it was at Polito’s. Some zoos spend huge sums on fibreglass trees with steel foliage; wonderful to the eye, perhaps, but lacking the unpredictable movement, the textures, smells and microfauna and flora that wild animals experience in real trees. Traditional zoos at least supply balls and tyres, which offer some amusement. No such ...”

“... who worked with him briefly, and in whom he had no interest (and of whom he had no memory), was John Cage. Goldfinger claimed to be a lifelong Marxist, but he never joined the Communist Party. In 1931, he met Ursula Blackwell, a woman of enormous resilience and wit who was then studying painting with Amédée Ozenfant. They married in 1933 and moved the ...”

“... to have given up his rather clunky artistic ambitions (to frame his friends ‘in the heavy steel webs of metaphors which will last half as long as [Alexandria] itself’) and says he is thinking of writing a book of criticism, his friend Clea, a painter, hits him across the mouth so hard he has to go to the bathroom to mop up the blood. Among the ...”

“... and a counterpoint to, a recent near-fatal illness, whose course he describes in ‘Travels with John Hunter’. (John Hunter is the name of a hospital.) Though Murray’s poem about his time in hospital seems meant as the book’s serious centrepiece, its stanzas keep veering off into nervous, dull jokes: ‘The only poet ...”

“... now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for which O’Brian wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at W.W. Norton, read a borrowed paperback of the ...”

“... adulatory masque to welcome the Queen on her 50-minute visit to the university of the city of steel (claiming later that this left her no alternative but to knight him). He was, finally, recognised as a sort of quaint hero, a survivor, the teacher who had risked crossing the Chinese Communist lines to give a lecture on Macbeth; who had, by now a long time ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... in one of the main patents had been acquired by Washburn and Moen, a Massachusetts-based iron and steel company. What made barbed wire so competitive? In 1880, Washburn and Moen, who were by then producing more of it than anyone else, made the following cost comparison with wooden fencing, taking as their example 40 rods (100 metres) of three-bar ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... Nicole.’ Or Gilmore as a callous killer from way back, boasting of a killing done in jail? Cold steel. Questioner: ‘How would you describe your personality?’ Gilmore: ‘Slightly less than bland.’ Or Gilmore as somewhere afraid of himself as a would-be child-molester? Or as hating Mormons (his victims were Mormons, not that this is unusual in ...”

“... sure of her social position not to care what the Club might think. The granddaughter of a Durham steel magnate and Liberal MP who twice refused a peerage (though he accepted a baronetcy from Gladstone), she was a wealthy and well-connected woman who went East to escape the constraints of Victorian society. She was related by marriage to some of Britain’s ...”