“... of this devastating episode only in the past decade, although geologists first recorded a major changeover in the Earth’s flora and fauna nearly 15o years ago. The reasons for this lie in the origins of geology as a science. The study of the Earth emerged in the 18th and early 19th centuries from a combination of cosmology, natural historical ...”

“... He gives short histories of dozens of Bunyan’s contemporaries, noting, for instance, that John Kelyng, the judge who bullied Bunyan in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when ...”

“... of public opinion. The Presidential election of 1800, in which Jefferson trounced the incumbent John Adams, witnessed an outpouring of newspaper and pamphlet comment directed against his religious indifferentism. Could he be so sure that an atheist would neither pick his pocket nor break his leg? Soon after his death, a fellow Virginian, ‘Black Horse ...”

“... faith. Now, the edifice is crumbling, for while its sacred rites are still practised – from the major (public school and Oxbridge) to the minor (tailored suits and ordering the right wine) – slowly and unsurely the profession is admitting those from backgrounds other than the strictly upper middle class. The new entrants, it must be said, have continued ...”

“... only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the ...”

“... for a second before attempting an officer’s name when relating how Dr Lowndes ‘ran away with Major – Major Van Dyce’s lady that year’. That Kipling was well aware of the dangers of his own virtuosity in this direction is shown, I think, by ‘The Finest Story in the World’, which can be read either as a ...”

“... of them was that the Church bought out its partners at an early stage and at a generous price. Sir John Hall, the Newcastle entrepreneur, was bought out of the Gateshead Metro shopping centre before it was built. He got £40m, but the Church kept losing money on the project until it was finally sold at a staggering loss in 1990. Sir ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet ...”

“... the problem of the Minister of Health. By contrast, at one point during the Suez invasion in 1956 Major Salah Salem thought that Gamal Abdul Nasser should give himself up personally to the British ‘because it is only you they want’: the Egyptian leader contented himself with sending the major into retirement with his ...”

“... episode in the transformation of Britain from a minor power with a dynastic foreign policy to a major one with an imperial destiny. It laid the foundations of the constitutional practices which would be exported round the world. In Scotland it overthrew the Episcopalian state church and led to the Act of Union. In Ireland it crushed the Catholic bid for ...”

“... And that is what happened, though not before, in an act of frivolity that simply beggars belief, John Major, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, had taken sterling into the European exchange-rate system. By the summer of 1992, the German Discount Rate was at a historic peak of 8.75 per cent and Britain was in a recession of astonishing savagery. Sensing ...”

“... led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... a popgun. Her glib palaver is most regrettable in her account of Wilson’s relationship with his major director, Lloyd Richards, whom he called ‘my guide, my mentor, my provocateur’. Their collaboration on six plays of the cycle was as intimate and as important to American theatre as that of Elia Kazan and Tennessee Williams. In both cases, the plays ...”

“... Iain McCalman has written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored ...”