“... 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 ...”

“... his shoulder and would complete the full term’s reading and papers in its first weeks to leave more time for playing tennis. When he was 14 he was ranked the 17th-best player in the Midwest and ‘around one hundredth in the nation’. ‘Competitive tennis, like money pool,’ he wrote in an essay, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine.’ Brian Southam begins his Introduction to ‘Grandison’ by quoting the apparently prophetic observation of Margaret Drabble in 1974 ...”

“... counterculture as a chronicler of psychedelia and fringe religion. By then he had published more than thirty novels, most of them as fleeting mass-market paperbacks, and well over a hundred short stories, most of them in SF magazines. By dying in March, Dick missed the May premiere of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first movie made from his ...”

“... a leitmotif in Heaney, associated with the freedom of the imagination and with his belief that a more inclusive definition of Irishness can ease the problems of the North. His ‘ground’ has also shifted, not just in the sense that migration from Ulster to Wicklow has been followed by transatlantic shuttling between Dublin, Harvard and Oxford, but ...”

“... so the ‘hapless lover’s dull shame sinks/Away sometimes in day-dreams, and he thinks/No more of yesterday’s disgrace and foil.’ The disgrace was personal. By the time he was writing the poem, the Red House was sold and Jane was involved with Rossetti, who called her Lucrezia Borgia and documented their affair in blazing portraits. Morris ...”