“... of Attic culture through the Phoenicians from Egypt – activities which he rather touchingly took up again during his last years as a Classics professor in Dublin. All his life Hopkins was haunted by the sense of personal bankruptcy and impotence, the straining of ‘time’s eunuch’ with no more to ‘spend’, and this sense of ...”

“... man reached out and, in a gesture strongly reminiscent of something Darth Vader does in Star Wars, took his windpipe between the gloved thumb and index finger of his right hand. The man went quiet and very still. ‘You getting my message?’ asked the policeman. ‘It’s time for you to piss off now.’ I gave up writing football match reports soon after ...”

“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... new terran planet, new animal and plant creation and new social orders to inhabit it. He evidently took care and specialist advice in putting the whole together. Plausibility has always been a fetish with him (he disdains, for instance, the conveniently easy tricks of Faster than Light travel in his SF, thinking it scientifically illogical). The Helliconian ...”

“... who died in 1811, E.H. Coleridge established beyond doubt that the poems were written in memory of John Edleston, a 15-year-old Trinity choirboy with whom Byron fell in love in October 1805. And Marchand has subsequently fleshed out the episode. Edleston (nicknamed ‘the Cornelian’) was working-class, fair, thin (Byron was at the time monstrously fat), and ...”

“... longer and later than usual that year, and on 17 December 1903, with Orville at the controls (they took turns), the Wright brothers’ plane flew for the first time. Man had achieved powered flight. The rest, as everyone knows, is history, all the way from Kitty Hawk to the £29.99 easyJet offer to Catania you’ve only this minute deleted from your inbox (or ...”

“... on lavatory walls. This seems to be the message of ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Up-harsin’, one of John Cheever’s loopy, luminescent, triumphant later stories. The narrator, returning to America after a long absence, enters a stall in the men’s room at Grand Central Station, and there, etched into the marble partition (‘it might have been a giallo ...”

“... muralists of the early 20th century, and the American artists of the Federal Art Project who took inspiration from them. Paloma’s Minotaure, a temporary wall painting made at the ICA in 1993, showed a grisaille frieze of Amazonian women dispatching male minotaurs. The image was surrounded by painted marble cartouches (Eisenman had previously done ...”

“... which subsequently turn out to be accurate. An Experiment seems kooky now, but H.G. Wells took an interest, and so did the Tolkien/Lewis Inklings, and J.B. Priestley, among others. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer and former soldier, and part of the appeal of his book was probably that he dressed his speculations with the correct amount of ...”

“... opinion. The 127th Baluchis, whose trenches were only a few yards away from the German lines, took to throwing stones at the enemy, which were promptly returned. ‘It is a fine sight to see, and a fine game, the game we are playing with the Germans.’ Even so, desertion was not uncommon, particularly after a gas attack; the authorities seem to have ...”

“... and had a decent respect for the religious behaviour of his fellow Catholics. In politics he took the view that the powers that be were ordained of God. Pope Leo X, a Medici nephew and one of Martines’s pet abominations, hit the nail on the head when he said that the Luther case was ‘a quarrel among monks’, meaning between Dominicans and ...”

“... for its ‘gentleness and refinement’. On the other hand, the fact that so many portraits by John Opie ‘are thoroughly dull, if not frankly bad’, was owed to the fact that as the son of a carpenter ‘he had no elegance in his make-up, but was commissioned to do portraits of fashionable persons.’ Remarkable for its range as Waterhouse’s book ...”

“... empire became even more influential on Elizabethan strategic thinking. According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most ...”

“... has existed for roughly ten billion years. Even to get from Earth’s formation to our century took as long, Martin Rees remarks, as journeying half across America at the rate of one step per two thousand years. Our sun will shine steadily for five billion more years before swelling and vaporising our planet. The universe, however, will probably last for ...”

“... vast, invisible system not conceived or constructed by any individual or entity’. News took many forms. It could be words exchanged by the people who haunted Venice’s Rialto. You might hear news in a barbershop, a pharmacy or a London coffee house; out in the street, you could listen to the headlines being relayed by ballad-singers, whose public ...”