“... a marauding Danish general, kicked his head around in triumph. Conversely, the public hanging of John Platts outside Derby County Jail in April 1847 drew a crowd of twenty thousand – descendants of the ‘seething mob’ that played Shrove Tuesday football. When the FA was founded in 1863 it knew it was in direct competition for crowd support with public ...”

“... editor of this posthumous collection of essays by J.B. Harley, bellwether of the new geography, took the unusual precaution of including a critical introduction by J.H. Andrews, for fear that Harley’s approach might become ‘an unquestioned orthodoxy or worse, a catechism’. Just what that approach was defies easy summary because it hybridised so many ...”

“... opportunist whose idea of the long term is tomorrow’s Daily Mail headline, and who, unlike John Major in similar circumstances, is seemingly prepared to do almost anything to retain his leadership. In his attempts to contain Ukip he has already given a number of hostages to fortune. He has promised a referendum on EU membership – on Ukip’s ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... Marian frame – as an illustration of a popular story from the Apocrypha, which has the infant John the Baptist, in flight from Herod’s executioners, come across Christ on his flight into Egypt. Though never was Egypt like this. Maybe the trigger for the temple of boulders was a line from the Song of Songs: ‘My dove in the clefts of rocks (in ...”

“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”

“... Archimedes’ death is the one fixed point in his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the ...”

“... or less confused in 18th-century Europe, when townspeople flocked to watch the oculists perform. John Taylor was the superstar of sight restoration, taking his show around England, Germany, Italy and France: many purblind celebrities would be subjected to his oratorical preambles (I quote from one above) before the scalpel plunged in. How far did Taylor’s ...”

“... whom Sidney had recently met at the residence of the English ambassador Francis Walsingham, took shelter for some days at a bookshop in rue St Jacques, then returned to his lodgings where he was murdered while at prayer. Sidney must have witnessed many horrific scenes, but none of his letters from this period survives; indeed there are no letters from ...”

“... Teeth exposed what Luttwak rightly calls the ‘tenth-century military renaissance’, and John Haldon, who has written extensively on Byzantine armies. Although Luttwak’s style reflects his journalism, his analyses are solidly rooted in recent Byzantine studies, which, as he observes in his preface, ‘have flourished as never before’. He ...”

“... Some 25 years after Alsace had been returned to France at the end of the Second World War, I took an opportunity to work there for a few months, in the belief that it would improve my French. A few bare facts about the contested history of the region had stayed with me from school history lessons, but they couldn’t have prepared me for what I walked into ...”

“... in close conjunction with the Church. Only Oxford and Cambridge had medical schools. The training took between six and nine years, involved placements in Salerno and Paris, and incorporated not just botany, anatomy and pharmacology, but astrology, geometry, music and algebra. Astrology and geometry were essential given the importance of the stars to ...”

“... on the Baro-Kano railway (you couldn’t make this up). He was usually in Nigeria, where he never took his family, and died when Pamela was 12. The family background belongs on the slippery edges of social status; Amy’s family were vaguely theatrical – her father had been a manager for Henry Irving – and thought of themselves approvingly as ...”

“... be displaced by the US without the risk of Moscow retaliating by other means. Smaller states took advantage of rivalry between the superpowers to enhance their independence, but the break-up of the Soviet Union meant that this was no longer possible. One of the more rational reasons advanced by Saddam for invading Kuwait in 1990 was that the freedom of ...”

“... responsibility’ for what they had done. At Los Alamos, Feynman wrote, the great mathematician John von Neumann ‘gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility … It’s made me a very happy man ever since.’ The great thing about ...”