“... Chadwick’s dictum and eventually spurred one of the great feats of Victorian engineering – Joseph Bazalgette’s vast metropolitan sewer system.The germ theory of disease that gained currency in the last decades of the 19th century provided a new vocabulary for talking about the risks of foul water, but new concepts reinforced old sensibilities. In the ...”

“... subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two months later, in Thermidor, the politically nimble Barère voted to condemn Robespierre to death, but that is another story). He called ...”

“... planning, with a particular emphasis on shrinking the extraordinary consumption of the global north via economic restructuring and domestic and international redistribution.Any such plan must envision a rapid and highly co-ordinated global programme of decommissioning. Our current growth-oriented regime has put most of the power and resources in very few ...”

“... advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets.’ Once he made it to the big leagues via his adventures with Argus, Black began to expand his portfolio of ...”

“... thee an ark of gopher wood.’ But nobody knows what gopher wood is. The Ark Encounter is made of North American timber – Engelmann spruce, Douglas fir – and radiata pine from New Zealand. More important, is a wooden vessel of this scale viable? The largest wooden ship ever built, the schooner Wyoming, was 450 feet long on completion in 1909. When its ...”

“... the apothecary James Petiver, the Queen’s botanist Leonard Plukenet and the silk-weaver Joseph Dandridge, whose collections of insects, plants and curiosities were purchased or inherited by Sloane and added to his own stock. Such holdings were easily seen as capital: ‘Sir Hans is ready to promote such designs, wallowing in his own money,’ moaned ...”

“... summer 1853, as Clarke guesses, he was walking with Millais on a ‘beautiful moonlit night’ in North London when the young men were astonished by the vision of a ‘young and very beautiful woman dressed in flowing white robes’. She paused for a moment ‘in an attitude of supplication and terror. Then seeming to recollect herself, she suddenly moved on ...”

“... hers – form the basis of a growing movement that has now spread from Germany to Switzerland and North America. Hildegard of Bingen’s Medicine, written by Gottfried Hertzka, a physician, and his successor Wighard Strehlow, formerly a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, distils the principles of their ‘Hildegard Practice’, founded about forty years ...”

“... brighter gold on the altar it shelters. The arrangements on the outer walls of the chapels in the north aisle, completed more than twenty years later, are no less distinguished. In two of these chapels, spectacular monolithic columns, one of pavonazzo marble (white, with exquisite purple veins), the other of fior di persico (resembling damson mixed with ...”

“... de Saint-Mémin, a local aristocrat who, having earned his living making profile portraits in North America, was appointed director of the city’s art academy by the restored Bourbons. Although now incorporated within a much larger museum complex, it may claim to be the earliest, as well as the most spectacular, surviving museum devoted to the art of the ...”

“... a reassuring feeling of continuity and survival. Now, blocking the view of the vast horizon to the north, there will be that silly bridge carrying more cars to a gigantic third airport. Little of Istanbul – the Istanbul of high-rises, unfinished corporate spires, highways and bare street life that stretches across an area nearly four times the size of London ...”

“... Nazis to ‘co-ordinate’ the media when they came to power in 1933. Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had long condemned what he called ‘the lying Jewish press’, and within a few weeks, the Nazis had closed down the Social Democratic Party’s outlets (it printed more than two hundred newspapers in 1929, with an overall circulation of 1.3 ...”

“... Queen Victoria’s armpit abscess in 1871 poured pus for days after it was cut open by Joseph Lister. All that is remembered is the carbolic spray getting into her eyes. Rommel’s swollen nose caused him to leave North Africa just before the battle of el Alamein to recuperate. Monty gets all the credit ...”

“... in hospital. He booked himself into a psychiatric treatment-and-research department in the north of Moscow. I realised Alexey was in a hospital ward when I saw the photos he was posting on Facebook: ‘Welcome to my new home,’ he joked. It seemed fitting that my Facebook feed was filling up with posts from a mental institution. As the conflict over ...”

“... was published because it took her a long time to find a voice for fiction: she couldn’t have a North London Jewish one because she’s Liverpudlian, and she couldn’t be Liverpudlian because she’s middle-class, she couldn’t be middle-class because it’s too much like ‘ventriloquism’ and she couldn’t do British-Jewish because the British don’t ...”