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“... Meades lists the chemist’s shops and dowdy hotels of Salisbury, where he grew up: the Old George Inn (‘delightful’), The Crown (with ‘a swirly carpet’, owned by a fraudster called Cyril), The White Hart, The King’s Arms (‘lobster thermidor’). He lists the secret vices of this world – ‘winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned ...”

“... to the closely observed loveliness of trees. As far back as the 12th century, the Yorkshire monk Walter Daniel described the surroundings of his beloved Rievaulx as ‘a second paradise of wooded delight’ where the ‘branches of lovely trees rustle and sing together’ over the tumbling waters of the river. Mabey’s essays, which begin from his own ...”

“... to be cut, pasted, amplified, modified and manipulated in a great number of ways. Fred Sanger and Walter Gilbert’s discovery in 1977 of methods for reading the sequence of DNA molecules raised the enticing possibility that the genetic ‘texts’ of living things might one day be read in their entirety. Indeed, in the same year, Sanger published the entire ...”

“... Oscar Wilde (with his quasi-Renaissance velvet suits), as well as the female cross-dresser (from George Sand to Marlene Dietrich). We learn of ‘The Anti-Neutral Suit’ in the Futurist Manifesto, which promised ‘three-dimensional colour acrobatics’, and the TuTa of 1919, an avant-garde adaptation of the utilitarian boiler suit that supposedly heralded ...”

“... round suffrage societies trying at short notice to find a Welsh speaker who would flatter Lloyd George; she organised a fancy-dress march to Downing Street with representatives of all the suffrage groups (‘like trying to harness a pack of wild elephants – and wild elephants with years of private conflict behind them’). ‘If we get the vote ...”

“... seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says ...”

“... the aid of a magnifying glass. These writings ‘give one the idea’, she told her publisher George Smith, ‘of creative power carried to the verge of insanity’. The Brontë children’s juvenilia began as a series of plays for performance, but soon developed into rival literary enterprises, each involving a complex apparatus of ...”

“... paragraphs, quoted in succession though they appear in the book in parallel: When the critic George Steiner looked through the entries for the Sunday Times Baudelaire translation competition he was judging in 1968, he was no doubt a little surprised. Someone had submitted more than thirty versions of the same poem. When the journalist Jürgen Serke came ...”

“... a film dedicated to the good of mutual understanding, Davies played with avuncular benignity by Walter Huston, and the film introduced by Davies himself. The movies actually written by Communists in the late 1930s (the harvest years of the Hollywood CP, after the ‘fair seed-time’ of the Popular Front) are almost all unwatchable. Murray Kempton in Part ...”

“... want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration ...”

“... one had ever paid so much money for a social media company before.Musk’s authorised biographer, Walter Isaacson, couldn’t make sense of it – ‘I thought it was insane,’ he told the Financial Times – and Musk’s friends and family didn’t understand it either. Wasn’t Musk supposed to be busy getting humans to Mars by 2025? Kimbal Musk told his ...”

“... Cuneiform studies have come far since 1872, when George Smith, assistant keeper in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, engrossed the December meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology with a paper on ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’. Among the tablets recovered from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh he had found an account of a world-wide flood which resembled the narrative of Genesis not only in its main outline but even in detail ...”

“... lacking its nuclear pit was accidentally released from another B-47 and landed in the backyard of Walter Gregg’s family home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Its high-explosive casing detonated, digging a 35-foot crater, destroying the family Chevrolet, killing six chickens and deeply embarrassing the Pentagon, which had led the American public to believe ...”

“... for a while longer, a wish shared by many ‘wise men’ of the West, from Alexandre Kojève to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires to one of nation-states. But by war’s end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape of the Pax Americana. Perry Anderson, in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his first sustained critique ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the ...”