“... Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two narratives are here in constant tension. One is an up to date, deeply informed, but ultimately traditional, history of medicine, though mercifully short on the genealogy, on who begot whom, which ...”

“... in a game of chess and claims Edain as his prize. When Midar returns to the palace a year and a day later to fetch Edain, and is challenged by the King of Munster’s army, he lulls the king, his men and the queen into a trance by playing a golden harp and singing to them, before stealing Edain away. Wilde also included a more recent account of an Irish man ...”

“... In the event Lawrence contented himself with ringing a bell in college in the middle of the day, since All Souls ‘needs waking up’. Graves and Nancy tried to support themselves while he was in theory an undergraduate by setting up a general store in Boars Hill outside Oxford, the landscape across which Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy had wandered ...”

“... excess, when they would begin drinking as soon as the pubs opened in the morning, carry on all day, take a bottle of whisky and a bottle of vodka with them into a late-night movie, and continue through the night drinking home brew at Peter’s house. During these two-man carnivals they would go into a hotel, plug all the baths and leave the taps ...”

“... and the ‘ragged peasants’ he met. There, he said, ‘it was as though Homer had come alive.’Robin Flower, another English scholar who came to the Blaskets (in 1910), also perceived this kind of timelessness or a connection to a time and a culture long passed. In The Irish Tradition, he described meeting an old man on a path on the island who, ‘without ...”

“... though, in which Raffles, mercurial as ever, shrugs on, if only for the moment, the mantle of Robin Hood. In ‘A Jubilee Present’, Raffles offers his take on the gold cup which is to be presented to the nation to celebrate the queen’s Diamond Jubilee: ‘A number of the immorally rich clubbed together and presented it to the nation; and two of the ...”

“... in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.’ After the result it ran another headline saying: ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT.’ That was a joke, but from the ...”

“... and about whether that was a first example of industrial action … Let me start with that sad day in March 1603, when our beloved sovereign of blessed memory, Elizabeth, died … I was concerned about my hon. friend’s attack on the Victorian age, which was one of the finest ages in British history, when most employers were benevolent, kindly, good … I ...”

“... land because of the difficult terrain and members of the unit got by on a bowl of boiled rice a day. ‘We fought with all the weapons we had,’ the major said. ‘Even the unit’s cook carried a gun and fought alongside the soldiers. But we were running out of ammunition. Thirteen men had been killed and more than a third were injured. We were becoming ...”

“... with the law; her push-back against the intransigence of police and politicians. And then, one day last year, I stumbled on this paragraph: ‘David Boyd, 54, of Chesterton Court, Stockton, Teesside, has been charged with the murder of Nikki Allan.’ And I knew I was going back to Wearside.I found it utterly changed: the infrastructure, the ...”

“... trial didn’t take place until June 1943. ‘For the moment I write all I can, awaiting the evil day of prosecution,’ he said in 1942. But as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 ...”

“... It is of course a picture of the rise of Christianity which has taken quite a beating recently. Robin Lane Fox has shown that early Christianity was really a very middle-class affair. Nietzsche dedicated Human All Too Human – admittedly in one of his spasmodic reactions against Schopenhauer – to Voltaire, saint of the Enlightenment. The connection ...”

“... us did, and even the women who bought one puffball for an evening weren’t going to change their day wear. So – fashion designers took huge losses, and department stores reeled, and some stores went out of business and some clothing operations in the US are still suffering from the results of the sulky determination of the late Eighties that fashion ...”

“... of Silvercup Studios,’ she said. ‘Instead, I just lay there knowing I had a job for another day and health insurance through the Screen Actors Guild.’ Years after the original series aired, the most prominent male member of the cast, Chris Noth, was accused by several women of sexual assault (accusations he denies).At least in its early seasons, Sex ...”

“... a shameful thing that had happened when she was a teenager – something she thought about every day, and was ashamed still to be thinking about, because she kept telling herself it had been nothing.In his testimony, Kavanaugh yelled at the Judiciary Committee that he had ‘busted his butt’ in high school to be the basketball captain, get into Yale, go to ...”