“... he had collected data on several Alpine glaciers, but no one had ever attempted to do so in winter. He got to Folkestone but bad weather meant crossing the Channel was impossible and he returned to London. The next day, confident conditions were improving, he set off again. The snow in France was thick and he didn’t reach Geneva until Christmas ...”

“... the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke ...”

“... as vulgar and sensationalist) go on predictable yearly migrations, like antelope or songbirds. In winter they leave the California coast and head out thousands of miles to Hawaii. In August, they return to congregate at ‘hub spots’ off the California coast, including one just off a popular beach near Monterey. In between they go to the ‘White Shark ...”

“... Abendroth made exhaustive use of German archival sources in Hitler in der spanischen Arena (1973); Robert Whealey devoted a well-informed chapter to the matter in Hitler and Spain (1989); and there are two monographs based on German and Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and ...”

“... types’, Summerscale calls them. Several were free-thinkers, proto-Darwinians – the publisher Robert Chambers, for example, secret author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and George Combe himself – though, like Darwin, they hesitated to spell it out. The Drysdales too saw the universe in largely materialist terms, finding it hard to ...”

“... as simple as that? By Christmas last year it was clear that New Labour was presiding over a new winter of discontent, with the Government’s management of everything from the health service and cattle disease to public transport under fierce popular scrutiny. John Prescott, with his two Jaguars and his immense self-satisfaction, became an obvious target ...”

“... and the other artists who could be considered Yiddish modernists – the painters Nathan Altman, Robert Falk and, for a time, El Lissitzky, the composers Lev Pulver and Moshe Milner, the writer who called himself Der Nister – were defined by the struggle to integrate these two tendencies. ‘Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism and our ...”

“... Over the winter, you may have seen posters for a movie, certificate 12A (‘moderate fantasy violence and horror . . . limited bloody images’): a bunch of teenagers, Hollywood-dishy, but coloured to look like corpses, with greenish-tarnished complexions and uncanny eyes. The movie, Twilight, is about a coven of high-school vampires in the American Pacific Northwest, and is adapted from the first of a series of four novels by Stephenie Meyer; the last instalment, Breaking Dawn, came out last year ...”

“... was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. Since then he has published another modern thriller, Dominion (2012), which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation, and six further books set in Tudor England, progressing from publishing success to phenomenon. He has now sold ...”

“... Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert Browne, who in the 1580s lent his name to Ainsworth’s brethren (‘Brownists’), wavered in and out of conformity as conscience and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a ...”

“... house in Cheshire and his mind would all his life pullulate – like that of his mother’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson – in a ‘nursery-sickroom atmosphere’. His father, a captain in the York and Lancasters, was killed at Ypres in May 1915. His maternal grandmother, Emily, was ‘a great psychosomatic virtuoso’. And his mother Kathleen’s ‘intense ...”

“... with the possible exception of Cambridge, where there was nothing to offend the eye, and going in winter as I did in those days one would find the Piazza San Marco empty. It was at the Accademia with its thin walls that I first overheard sexual intercourse, and the shout of a man coming, ‘Vengo! Vengo!’28 January. Today was Dad’s birthday. He was very ...”

“... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”

“... proposition that the body was nothing more than a complex system of measurable physical processes. Robert Koch’s Institute in Berlin was the epicentre for the bacteriological revolution – one pathogen, one disease and, we hope, one vaccine, one cure – which still dominates medical thinking. And so on. By the end of the 19th century the institutional ...”