“... than the sight of their leader flailing around at Prime Minister’s Questions, as Corbyn took him to pieces. What, after all, is the point of Johnson, if he can’t dismiss his opponents with a clever turn of phrase? What, indeed, is the point of the Oxford Union, if one of its most celebrated presidents can’t win a debate against an Islington ...”

“... telephone had become a casualty of some particularly dire financial emergency.I was examined by John Gowen, an Englishman with a small practice in Youghal, who drove up to Brook Lodge a couple of hours later. The epidemic had begun in July – polio was sometimes called the ‘summer plague’ – and he can’t have had much doubt about what the diagnosis ...”

“... will themselves have become as extinct as the ones that science fiction once expressed. (John Clute, quoted here, considered the entire genre a ‘set of fairytales about the afterlife’.) To read this book is to become infected with a fascination I hadn’t realised Mars held. By the end I was left feeling a strange, even European twinge of envy. I ...”

“... leaves the impression that the country’s territorial expansion on the North American continent took place largely through peaceful settlement and the purchase of land, Anderson and Cayton emphasise the centrality of military conquest. They are nothing if not ambitious. Their aim in The Dominion of War is to dismantle what they call the traditional ‘grand ...”

“... firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ The colonel does remember the ice when he faces the firing squad and he remembers it just before he dies. But these are separate memory-events, and what the colonel doesn’t do is what the sentence most clearly seems to promise: die ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...”

“... were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England ...”

“... apartment had previously been occupied by Vaughn Meader, once known for his impressions of John F. Kennedy. On the night of the assassination, Lenny Bruce supposedly walked out on stage and said: ‘Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.’ The colour field painter Stephen Mueller lived in the building, as did the poet Eleanor Lerman, who worked in the ...”

“... was held any longer. Even then the Junta did not choose to accept the Supreme Court decision, but took the arbitrary course of depriving him of his citizenship and expelling him from the country. He describes his departure even then as hazardous – 15 minutes after he had left for the airport with a variety of competing escorts, a squad arrived at his flat ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... of aristocratic families in decline, who retained pretentions to mighty connections (such as King John Sobieski) even as they subsided into ruin. His father Jan Norwid died in a debtors’ prison, and his mother died when he was only four. The Polish youth of the period was devoted to plotting and to fantasies of vengeance. In secret conventicles, forbidden ...”

“... Grand Lodge, out of four merged London lodges, and in the course of the century the rituals took permanent shape around the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, while the Masonic message crossed the Channel to France, probably borne there by Jacobite exiles. In Britain the middle and professional classes have provided the society’s main support ever ...”

“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his bag, and were turned into stone. What goes for seeing also goes for imagining we are seeing. We do a lot of such imagining, and many of the books, news pictures, films and television images we enjoy are designed to stimulate ...”