“... the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to run wherever her feet took her, away from the man who was waiting for her in the green cave [of the haystack], but she knew she wouldn’t.’ And so, a virgin from a virgin land, she gives herself to the Muscovite, whose child she bears. One can see what’s meant here – technology ...”

“... of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I began reading John Evelyn’s diary entries for January and February 1684, I should have been delighted. Instead, I felt an odd revulsion: 9 January: I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted ...”

“... in reverse, Though we were still. Like cigarettes and cokes This was their slight excitement, took up slack In time that wound by, idle. Nothing worse And nothing better. To me it seemed so short,           I wanted more, I wanted hours, I wanted to be caught In that dense undergrowth by that wet shore. This was an exit from our boring life, A ...”

“... inclinations and on terms of near-equality. Though she had the reputation of loving society, she took a high view of the duties and destiny of a wife. In 1814, at the age of 19, she chose. ‘I assure you,’ she told a cousin, ‘that my heart and my judgment are equally satisfied with the man of my choice.’ The chosen one was ...”

“... with a ‘certification’: this short, thin, black tie had a provenance. It had been worn by John Lennon at a London concert in the 1960s. The letter of ‘certification’, signed by the impresario concerned and by Lennon himself, confirmed the association between tie and wearer. I also have a record of a cheque I wrote on 27 January 1982. This is for ...”

“... unaccountable power of banks and other sinister financial interests. Half a century or so after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, around 60 per cent of Americans still dissent from the official verdict that a lone gunman was responsible, though there’s no consensus about the identity of the conspirators: variously the Mafia, the CIA or Castro’s ...”

“... be comic; there’s certainly no shortage of good material. Black’s almost manic social climbing took the peculiar form of wanting to meet famous people, hang out with them, and fill them in at great length on history and current affairs. He had an excellent memory, and was not afraid to use it. Lists of Swedish kings, Spanish ships in the Armada, minor ...”

“... his remarks on the claims of various astronomers and mathematicians. The schoolman incarnate, he took much the same line in castigating his medical colleagues. If a doctor chose to rely on Hippocrates, how good could he be if he was ignorant of the art of Criticism? Scaliger found that numbers could be harder to correct than words. But although his ...”

“... failed for sure to spare it a glance. In France, it was not so. There, the members of the Oulipo took due notice of a calendrical windfall and laid plans for some suitably reversible celebrations, such as inviting President Menem of Argentina to come and address audiences in the towns of Noyon and Laval, and ...”

“... the judges, who were wealthy members of the German-speaking elite. When an old man called Mātiss took the stand, the judges noticed that the local innkeeper, who had already been questioned, was smiling. Asked why, he replied that he was amused to see ‘Old Thiess’, his neighbour and tenant, swearing on the Bible, since ‘everyone knows he goes around ...”

“... A few months before his early death from tuberculosis, John Keats scribbled these lines in his papers: This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is I hold it towards you ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... Elders, a group of daimyo (feudal lords) who would govern until his son Hideyori came of age. It took just two years for one of the five, Tokugawa Ieyasu, to oust the seven-year-old ruler and unify Japan under his own banner. The Tokugawa shogunate governed Japan for the next 250 years. James Clavell’s novel Shōgun (1975) is set during the power struggle ...”

“... A more carefree mode became possible when he got away from the North. Funded by an award, he took his wife and their sons to the South of France and Spain. Though his letters aren’t in the Byron league when it comes to exotic travel, they show a keen eye for the picturesque. To the Longleys, he wrote: ‘Swallows shit from the rafters all around ...”

“... of his father, whose waiting-room was constantly crowded with supplicants for his services. As John Juxon suggests, the elder Lewis could have served as a model for the abrasive Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, who suspended his moral judgment when dealing with his greasy, grimy riffraff of clients – cracksmen, fences, thieves – and then, in ...”