“... quite new in American information control: all knowledge deemed relevant to atomic weapons – no matter how, where or by whom it was produced. The AEA considered atomic knowledge to be, as was later said, ‘born secret’.The legal category of ‘restricted data’ and the notion that certain sorts of knowledge were classified at birth proved far more ...”

“... intelligence, at his fluency in dictation, and (as Ricks and McCue have pointed out) at the way matter in the letters connects with matter in the poetry: I mean that one ought to be able to look at what you have set down out of the margins of one’s eye, the part in which the rods and cones are less worn, just as one can ...”

“... of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent ...”

“... are bound to haunt the scholars. What Hardy didn’t tell Sir George (or anyone else for that matter) was that he had decided to pre-empt posterity and become his own editor and biographer. He was ‘ghosting’ his own life, to appear posthumously under his wife’s name. The destruction of his private papers was part and parcel of a plot to construct ...”

“... little enterprises. Nothing could be less true,’ she writes. But cities have long been as much a matter of big business as they are of ‘mom and pop stores’, and Jacobs’s overriding preference for small business over big business would seem odd to many people who have rented from a small landlord or worked for a shopkeeper. When someone depends on your ...”

“... includes what may well be Heidegger’s only reference to the holocaust, in a letter to Herbert Marcuse, one of his former pupils. Marcuse’s reproaches are justified (Heidegger writes in January 1948): he can only add that ‘instead of “Jews” ’ Marcuse’s letter ‘ought to say “East Germans”, and then it is equally valid in respect of ...”

“... a famous landmark, known as Tennant’s Stalk. Until her marriage at the age of 30 to the widowed Herbert Henry Asquith, she was proudest of her role as leader of the Souls. She thought that, for all their academic brilliance, Asquith’s children by his first wife, Helen, were poor successors to her own coterie: The clever group of nowadays is very inferior ...”

“... the kids would have left for school so it was time for him to be heading home. Near Lardner lived Herbert Bayard Swope, the editor of New York’s smartest paper at the time, the World. Churchwell writes that Swope was socially ravenous and had people in almost nightly – lots of people, whose loud talk while drinking Swope’s liquor made it hard for ...”

“... with colleagues – such as the business school’s best-known member, the organisation theorist Herbert Simon – who they felt paid insufficient attention to fundamental economic processes. The question Modigliani and Miller addressed was whether the balance between debt funding and equity funding chosen by a firm affects its overall costs. Their ...”

“... Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain? After all, the lights still shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E ...”

“... deal with. Rather, he treats it as something the biographer must get out of his way. It is as if Herbert Spencer or John Stuart Mill, not Mrs Gaskell, herself a novelist, had descended on Haworth parsonage to decipher the lives of the makers of Gondal. Holden is too new to the world of theatre talk to have got all his details right, let alone arrange them ...”

“... his proposals be forwarded to Mussolini in a letter. He wanted something quite different: ‘The matter will be settled man to man between Mussolini and me, or else it will be merely bitched, botched, and bungled, bureaucratised, bastardised, boozled, boggled, and altogether zum wasser.’ As if momentarily sensing the oddity of his truculent demand to meet ...”

“... at entr’acte, what a people’ is his only comment after a trip to Glyndebourne. One professor, Herbert Myron, receives such gobbets as: ‘Read in the Mill on the Floss (Chap. VIII) “Mrs Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.”’ Another is treated with more ...”

“... regarded as a reckless unbeliever, and his name – along with those of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Herbert of Cherbury – became a byword for absolute atheism and hence, in Jacob’s terms, a rallying point for Radical Enlightenment. Jacob’s argument involved not only a new appreciation of 17th-century atheism and Spinoza’s early reputation, but also a ...”

“... properly got going, when becoming famous or celebrated or iconic was a completely different matter from what it is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched ...”