“... in 1733. Emergency midwives studied Chamberlen’s book, tore out the engravings of forceps and took them to instrument-makers. It seemed that craniotomies might become a thing of the past. One midwife, William Smellie, called forceps ‘artificial hands’, a cyborg technology that allowed male midwives to transcend gender and the impropriety of touching a ...”

“... Georgia was recaptured); Goose Green; and the eventual Argentinian surrender on 14 June. All this took Galtieri by surprise. That was the short-term sequel. Medium-term, the result was actually to strengthen Britain’s hold over the islands (‘Fortress Falklands’), increase the determination to hold them, and also, as it happens, to produce an economic ...”

“... who was also a fascist; next, as her stardom dawned, a Hollywood screenwriter; then an actor, John Loder, father of her two children; next, a nightclub owner; a Texas oilman; and finally her own divorce lawyer. She spent her last three decades alone. In Florida, where she died in 2000, her most ‘enduring’ friendship, according to Barton, was with a ...”

“... two prominent Jewish groups stepped in to back her up, while the New York Civil Liberties Union took her on.It was a great story, and I, then a young law writer for the New York Times, jumped on it. The case raised an important legal question: whether a person was free to leave his or her money to anyone he or she desired. But more intriguing was a cultural ...”

“... uses to cover Australians and Canadians as well as Moroccans and Senegalese), and military action took place in half a dozen far-flung locations ‘from the Caspian Sea to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific’. But it was primarily a British and American venture, with the French initially enthusiastic but dropping out early, and the Japanese pursuing a ...”

“... 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney ...”

“... Barker Centre with its statue of Winged Time. I had taken the same picture under the bust of John Harvard as I had on my last visit. I had seen William James’s house, had imagined Elif Batuman scampering around campus, gathering material for The Idiot. I had refused, out of pure perversion, to see the Glass Flowers, had gone to visit the Chinese jades ...”

“... creative impulse), it was not out of the desire to register the world around him. His friend John le Gay Brereton could see the importance of Henry Lawson. Brennan couldn’t. He had no interest in the bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive ...”

“... What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to some tea-shop, or to the pictures – recapturing the world of their girlhood, before men and money had turned ...”

“... Pavese was met with the news that Tina had married the boyfriend she had been seeing before she took up with him. He wrote: ‘Left alone, I’ve tried it, I know I won’t make it. Made one flesh and one destiny with her, I would have succeeded, I’m sure.’ Ten years later, the day after another lover married, Pavese wrote: ‘What happens once, happens ...”

“... He had followed instead the course of apprenticeship, a different kind of education: one which took place in a commercial workshop, taught artisan skills rather than intellectual ones, and was conducted in Italian rather than Latin. His description of himself as ‘unlettered’ is in part a sardonic celebration of this more practical form of learning. It ...”

“... and Shepherd would probably remove. In what he referred to as ‘an obvious diagnosis’, Rodinson took Israeli statehood to be the ‘culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and ...”

“... host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy Thompson’s English Journey, now deservingly out of print – he envisioned the ‘scene that would have been played out’ if she had been as good a ...”

“... the local maquis in sabotage operations. Although he thought of himself as a ‘pacifist’, he took satisfaction in resisting the Occupation. ‘For the first time, I no longer felt totally helpless over the death of my mother and my friend Jean. At least I had the feeling of avenging them.’In October 1943, the rafle came to Vire. Salomon Kaminsky and ...”

“... small and marginal players. Brazil was the only country where a sizeable fascist movement took root: the Ação Integralista Brasileira (Brazilian Integralist Action), which by the late 1930s had around 400,000 members. There was no fascist remaking of the old order as in Germany, Italy or Spain. The traditional pillars of elite rule, especially the ...”