“... in one of the main patents had been acquired by Washburn and Moen, a Massachusetts-based iron and steel company. What made barbed wire so competitive? In 1880, Washburn and Moen, who were by then producing more of it than anyone else, made the following cost comparison with wooden fencing, taking as their example 40 rods (100 metres) of three-bar ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... Nicole.’ Or Gilmore as a callous killer from way back, boasting of a killing done in jail? Cold steel. Questioner: ‘How would you describe your personality?’ Gilmore: ‘Slightly less than bland.’ Or Gilmore as somewhere afraid of himself as a would-be child-molester? Or as hating Mormons (his victims were Mormons, not that this is unusual in ...”

“... sure of her social position not to care what the Club might think. The granddaughter of a Durham steel magnate and Liberal MP who twice refused a peerage (though he accepted a baronetcy from Gladstone), she was a wealthy and well-connected woman who went East to escape the constraints of Victorian society. She was related by marriage to some of Britain’s ...”

“... more/Linwood no more/Methil no more/Irvine no more’. These were towns where big car plants and steel fabrication factories had recently shut down and sent their workers away. The song ends after a pause, with the repetition of the words ‘Lochaber no more’.The phrase has had several lives. It first appeared in a song by the Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay ...”

“... lined with rubbish, through an architectural jumble of slatted wood, rough concrete, padlocked steel doors; then climbed past anonymous compounds ringed with razor wire, around dirt bends where derelict-looking houses loomed above the road on iron stilts. By the time I reached my hotel, six hours after landing, the 18th century seemed more remote than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”