“... mixture of self-help manuals and learned philosophical treatises, combined advice on how to harden steel with goat’s blood and how to tenderise beef with fig stalks, methods for seeing faraway objects by combining curved glasses and for preventing lightning strikes by hanging a crocodile skin from the door. Renaissance printers sold handbooks for the ...”

“... stained like old plaster, some contain photographs. The whole library is contained in two vast steel bookcases measuring 14 feet by 26 feet. This is the end of the road which begins with the Kelmscott Chaucer and runs on through the heavy-paper pages and folio formats of the livres d’artiste of the 20th century. Book fetishism came naturally to ...”

“... often was, deliberately insulated from the highly-charged milieux of the Age of Steam, Soap and Steel. Peter Harman’s new book tries to demonstrate how much metaphysics mattered in the everyday labours of Victorian Britain’s greatest mathematical physicist. Comparisons are odious, but league-tables are another feature of the public life of contemporary ...”

“... of such choices. Since Eliot was not a buffoon or a pair of ragged claws, he indubitably had to steel himself. But the trouble with speaking, as Ackroyd does, of ‘his native caution’ is that this then becomes central or ruling, whereas for every ounce of native caution Eliot had at least an ounce of native boldness. Ottoline Morrell’s gibe at Eliot ...”

“... cared about the play. It was Dead-eye Dick, tormented by guilt in Midland City, who had found old John Fortune’s quite pointless death in Katmandu, as far away from his hometown as possible, somehow magnificent. Would we have a novel, then, if there were no authorial guilt to be discharged? The question is a blunt one, and yet it gains in significance if ...”

“... thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on his own badly-disciplined rank and file. The plaza where the Pope ...”

“... tarmac. This story was intended to show Wilson as the ace negotiator, a cool customer and man of steel. I remember one of the reporters saying: ‘To hear him talk about being President of the Board of Trade you’d think he’d been President of the United States.’ His popularity in the country, especially among Labour people north of the Trent, held up ...”

“... for a handful, in the House of Commons. Lord Gilmour admits that Thatcherism with a human face (John Major) is still Thatcherism. He is more reluctant to admit that the reason the Government is still Thatcherite is that the Conservative Party is largely Thatcherite. If he accepted that he might be able to explain the failure of the Wets more ...”

“... flock of pigeons in Washington Square. He knows the birds by name: Big Bosom, Lady Astor, St John the Baptist, Polly Adler, Fiorello. He wanders from saloon to saloon cadging beers, sandwiches and cash. Most important, he adds to his work-in-progress, a mysterious book that he calls ‘The Oral History of Our Time’. This massive, encompassing volume, a ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... later), Pardoe and Bartlett’s Beauties of the Bosphorus (seven out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... of the Standard Oil Company, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D. Rockefeller. ‘It is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair,’ Tarbell wrote. But she didn’t call for an end to the corporate form Rockefeller had done so much to ...”

“... was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to ...”