“... South Asian cricket, turns caustic when he writes about his own team. The English manager, Ray Illingworth, is typically graceless and petty, always finding an excuse for the team’s churlish behaviour on or off the field. He is slow to appreciate the brilliance of the Sri Lankans. Why, the despairing Winder asked, does England produce so many ...”

“... triumphant return along the Strand to Whitehall, to the sound of ‘such shouting as the oldest man alive never heard the like’. John Evelyn went further: This day, his majesty, Charles II, came to London … with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewn with ...”

“... A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had their revenge. Wertham is ...”

“... had to print it out to keep it) on 29 October 1969, he inaugurated a new era; some months later Ray Tomlinson invented the first email program, using an @ address where such messages could linger.That first computer network was funded by Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defence. The same outfit, now known as Darpa, with ...”

“... it is a binding force. On the second day of the reunion, the former courtroom photographer Ray D’Addario showed some old newsreel footage, which was silent, of the trials in progress, and all over the darkened room you could hear a low chorus of murmurs and whispers as people identified themselves and their friends while the camera slowly panned over ...”

“... imbued by the Holy Ghost as the parson who hunted six days of the week and preached another man’s sermon on the seventh. Some exhorters worked for the Cellar, Gutter and Garret Brigade, which combined the counselling of ‘fallen’ women, or women who looked like falling, with help in the home, two fields of activity from which male evangelists were ...”

“... a geode that split open to reveal a crystalline Virgin and Child, and an object resembling a hairy man – ‘some say a hermit, others think John the Baptist.’Kircher’s contemporaries puzzled over fossilised animals and their distribution. The Walloon mathematician René-François de Sluse wrote to the Royal Society in London enclosing a sketch of stones ...”

“... Margaret Blagge, burnished his pious image. But Sylva shows us quite a different Evelyn, a man who was driven by curiosity, ‘living for ingenuity’ and could even make a roomful of naval officials ‘die almost with laughing’. Luckily, Pepys was there, at the start of a long friendship, and, thanks to him, we know quite a lot more about ...”

“... charismatic and ultra-violent lesbian freelance who, the first time we meet her, is wearing Ray-Bans, a white leather jacket and white jeans. Rumour has it that she started as a debt collector and liked the buzz so much that she progressed to providing ‘drugs for government ministries … call girls for officials … information about ex-French ...”

“... 1957, when Little Richard returned to the church and left his band, the Upsetters, without a front man, Redding – who had been winning amateur talent shows around Macon – was tapped to fill in for a while. By the summer of 1958, he had dropped out of school, teamed up with a local guitarist named Johnny Jenkins, and joined a group called Pat T. Cake and ...”

“... wanting to be the thing they know themselves to be: a philosopher king. A spectacular example is Ray Dalio, whose story is excellently told in The Fund by Rob Copeland, a reporter at the New York Times who was formerly the hedge fund beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal.Dalio is the founder and principal owner of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest hedge ...”

“... jet passengers at Osaka’s international airport. The cases were too big for the regular X-ray machines, and the airport staff, no doubt exhausted from a long day processing holiday travellers, waved the men and their cargo through. Out on the tarmac, a ground crew worker noticed that one of the cases seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that ...”

“... and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day,’ he once said. ‘From his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can produce.’ He remarked of his friend Henry Ford: ‘This fellow Ford is like a postagestamp. He sticks to one thing until he gets there.’ He had a ...”

“... or to lose custody of their children. The Rorschach promised a short cut to the psyche, an ‘X-ray of the soul’. People might be mysteries unto themselves, but anyone can be figured out. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist who started creating personality tests when he was bored during the First World War. In a gorgeous sanatorium by Lake ...”

“... words a day on an endless book on government deficit spending, and later, on stories of a ‘hell ray’ death machine. Stafford’s two older sisters were conventional girls who enjoyed growing up in Boulder, Colorado, both a stronghold of Ku Klux Klan and the site of a tubercular colony. She detested her mother’s genteel housewifeliness and for a while ...”