“... Maxim Gorky, the historian M.N. Pokrovsky and the English Communist intellectual Maurice Dobb. He took to the new creed with fanatical excitement and all the convert’s zeal to proselytise. ‘What Lenin gave me was above all clarity and reality. The idealist servitude of my mind had made the free exercise of my intelligence impossible.’ Pares was not ...”

“... women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a woman of ill repute. The gazes which whizzed about and knocked and glanced against each other in the streets of Paris were an imaginative nexus from ...”

“... a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly mobile young London physician ‘to make all the Noise and Bustle you can, to make the whole Town ring of you if ...”

“... his face and hands with sickly-sweet toilet water and threw off his dressing-gown. Naked, he took a few steps on his points, did a little entrechat, quickly dressed, powdered his nose, and made up his eyes.’ This is the world that Vaslav Nijinsky entered as a young dancer in St Petersburg, a world, Acocella writes, ‘in which there was a heavy sexual ...”

“... then, impressed. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before the Devil’s Arch Advocate took on Faith itself. The book he has produced is clever, subtle and well-written, in an economical summary style. This much I expected, but I also found it, despite the archness, curiously affecting, highly serious and strangely profound. You quickly ...”

“... of things – but also to the ‘books I loved best . . . the ones that started in this world and took you to another’. He credits E. Nesbit with inventing the ‘mixing of the worlds’ in The Story of the Amulet (1906), the third of her novels about Cyril (who for some unaccountable reason Spufford thinks is called Hugh), Anthea, Robert and Jane and their ...”

“... attention of apprentice programmers. And so with their help, I taught myself BASIC. I soon also took out – or had taken out on my behalf – a subscription to Micro User, a magazine vast swathes of which were entirely incomprehensible to me, but which every month included the code for a BASIC game. The monthly game, and other software, later came free ...”

“... of Abyssinia. He enjoyed the physical challenges posed by the conflict: much of the fighting took place at high altitudes, in temperatures that reached 140° F. Many foreign correspondents were confined to Addis Ababa, but Matthews travelled with the Italian army, and was on hand to witness the battle in Ende Gorge in November 1935, when the Abyssinians ...”

“... directly at Mrs Touchet. Not a nice smile. A sharp smile, with a threat in it. Then bent down, took the second pail, and walked off towards the pantry, past all the kitchen drawers so full of sharp and threatening things.Such spiky delights. The passage follows a description of a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking ...”

“... They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping.’ John Lossing Buck determined that 79 per cent of the Chinese labour force were farmers, with an average family farm of 2.62 acres. (In the United States, 40 acres had always been seen as the minimum for subsistence farming, as in ‘40 acres and a mule’.) This ...”

“... than touched on by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his breezy book about ‘how curating took over the art world – and everything else’. But both do point out how far we have come from the original avatars of the term (whose root is cura or ‘care’): the curatores, the civil servants who oversaw public works like the aqueducts in ancient ...”

“... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...”

“... The Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who carried the instrument with him on his travels, took a reading of 46 during his ascent of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes in 1802. The diagram of Mount Chimborazo from Humboldt’s ‘Geography of Plants’ (1807). Humboldt was born in 1769. His scientific activities would be impossible to confine within ...”

“... the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his flock of sheep and oxen; in the evenings, they retired to estates built on acres of quiet pasture just outside the city, with names like De Ribbe (the Rib) or De Ijseren Verckens (the Iron Pigs), Dlammeken (the Little Lamb) or ’t ...”

“... mechanism of a phenomenon is very different from being able to mitigate its impact. The physicist John Tyndall identified the greenhouse effect in 1860, but generations of scientists have failed to instigate reforms that might slow it down. Perhaps it would be better to focus not on explaining the science, but on exposing the political and industrial ...”