“... monuments in which mothers and fathers kneel with their children behind them. There was to be one more child, another girl, Chloë. In their pinafores and hair ribbons, with Dennis in knickerbockers, all shy smiles against a background of lawn and shrubbery, it is the stuff of the long Edwardian summer, and equally illusory.Albert had first noticed Margaret ...”

“... elements formed on irradiating uranium could not be separated from barium, an atom only slightly more than half the weight of uranium. Just before Christmas 1938, Hahn wrote a letter to Meitner reporting this puzzling result. She and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, who later became professor of what the local Cambridge paper called Unclear Physics, realised ...”

“... both cheeks.’ And it was not just his furrows and hollows, it was his make-up: ‘We often see more hideous old men; but what contributed more than aught else to give to the spectre that rose before us the aspect of an artificial creation was the red and white paint with which he glistened.’ The man also wore a light ...”

“... then joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys. Although the more sensational aspects are Houellebecq’s invention, this character shares a great deal of his mother’s biography: she too was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant ...”

“... complete biography lurks behind the slow accumulation of these pages. We begin, what could be more boyish, with descriptions of the ‘wild dark-grey trousers’ of Cambridge, with paeans to Rupert Brooke, with bubbling appreciations of not very good poetry. He is an émigré, and unmistakeably happy to be at work building his name: this happiness is what ...”

“... against pilfering slaves. His rigourcaused him to be disliked, and determined one among them, more heartless, perhaps, than the rest, to undertake his destruction. On Christmas day, Mr Brown rode to … a neighbouring estate, and upon his return in the evening … he met with his untimely death.The slave to whom Mr Brown had rendered himself particularly ...”

“... December 2007.) Never before have the flaws of the Eurozone been so clearly exposed. We can expect more Greek drama before too long: the real struggle over the Eurozone – and the EU more broadly – is just beginning. If nothing else, Alexis Tsipras has demonstrated to the world that the Eurozone does not operate according ...”

“... many instrumental and ensemble pieces. The sheer density and quality of what remains is all the more staggering. Like Handel, his contemporary, and Mozart, born nine years after his death, Bach had an aural as well as dextral facility that made people gasp. At the keyboard, whether performing a work of his own, sight-reading or improvising, Bach also had a ...”

“... Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of ...”

“... taking it seriously is sometimes held to be a sign of political immaturity, or worse still, just more hypocrisy. We know that politicians can’t possibly sustain all the absurd contortions we demand of them as the price for securing our votes. In such circumstances, to insist that democratic politicians should honour all their promises, and practise what ...”

“... of the French Algerian town where the novel is set seems now to be its most significant failing; more than a hundred thousand were living in Oran at the time.‘Counting’ might, then, be an example of what Freud called the ‘antithetical meaning of primal words’ characteristic of the most ancient Egyptian languages: words which simultaneously denote one ...”

“... a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily absorbed and with real skill, mending fences, sawing up logs (once, too absorbed), laying ...”

“... reading, writing, drinking, gossiping, complaining, especially about money and neglect, and more often than not ill-advised romantic attachments. Though money, or the want of it, was not among Merrill’s complaints. Merrill seems to have believed that his life was an extension of his poetry, both of them works of art. His own life, or his life ...”

“... He carefully quoted from the US Declaration of Independence in his petition. In Manela’s more poignant version, he also rented a morning suit. Needless to say, Ho got nowhere near Wilson or any other Western leader; he found a sympathetic audience only among French Communists. Many Communist students I knew in India repeated with reverence the story ...”

“... A slightly hallowed – haloed – vision of poverty inhered in his work for a long time, more as an adjunct to his quasi-feudalism than as a by-product of industrialisation or mass production. ‘I sent you yesterday,’ he writes in a letter of October 1900, ‘a little package of a very excellent oat cereal to try. Directions on the package. Only ...”