“... concerns elsewhere, the north-eastern front posed serious problems for the PMAC from the moment it took power. A disastrous Ethiopian campaign in the spring of 1976 was followed by an Eritrean offensive at the end of the year. The Eritreans went on to take all the key towns in the territory except for Assab in the south and Asmara, the territorial ...”

“... There were closer friends who shunned him: Beardsley, for instance, who owed him so much; John Gray, an early lover, for whose Silverpoints, prettiest of Nineties poetry-books, Wilde had paid; Lilly Langtry, to whom he had, at one time, brought a daily lily, and who claimed to have sent him money without having actually done so. Beerbohm did not spurn ...”

“... case, said Tam, he ought to resign and make his reasons for doing so very explicit. Dick, he adds, took it like a lamb, observing merely that if Dalyell had had to wait 19 years for office he might not have been so quick with his recommendation. As it happens, dear old Tam has every reason to understand the desolation in that remark. His own puritanical sense ...”

“... was Diana Mosley, Sir Oswald’s wife. As the Windsors and the Mosleys grew old in exile, they took regular solace together, meeting and dining twice a week and musing about the great times they could have had if only the British had seen sense and sided with Hitler and Mussolini against the Reds. Of all the bonds which united this dreadful woman to the ...”

“... neglects to mention Fidel Castro’s claim, made to Kenneth Tynan and cited in Meyers, that ‘we took For whom the bell tolls to the hills with us, and it taught us about guerrilla warfare.’ Indeed, Lynn says nothing about Castro, or his relationship with the celebrated writer living in his country. The oddest lacuna of this kind, though, comes in his ...”

“... scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot O’Toole, and the 17 pages of laboratory entries she decided to copy from a colleague’s notebook – just in case ...”

“... his waxen wings in cloud cuckoo land’. The problems of dynamics and reversibility took Maxwell, with his talent for expressing his ideas in images, into the stormy world of Victorian journalism, where public scientists such as T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall preached materialism, evolutionism and other views ...”

“... The 1939 one, well prepared in advance, was put into instant action. Overseas evacuation mostly took place about a year later: by the time the Low Countries and France had capitulated, it seemed certain that Britain would be invaded next. It now seems extraordinary, however, that it was considered wiser to send children off on extremely dangerous sea ...”

“... for bland academic professionalism. The letters were written as both wrestled with philosophy, and took public positions on politics. The student revolt was under way, with Feyerabend nervously cheering in Berkeley, and Lakatos defiantly counter-revolutionary at LSE. The one thing new is that on 10 October 1970, as things are quietening down, Feyerabend – no ...”

“... was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a payment of ...”

“... This is true both for the content and for the scale of the prosecutions. Scotland, unlike England, took seriously the notion of the pact with the devil, and searched for witches by means of a ‘brodder’, whose task was to find the witch’s mark. Moreover, the scale of the witchcraft phenomenon in Scotland was much greater than in England. Dr Larner had a ...”

“... that might only be because his epigones have been talking in funny voices ever since. Later on, John Cleese made an almost comparable impact, in the sense that he, too, had clearly got his originality fully worked out in advance. But for everyone else, humour was a craft to be learned, even if the talent was unmistakable. Indeed it can be said that the ...”

“... feel, imagine or remember which, in their judgment, requires to be curtailed or cancelled.’ John Wing is taken to task for remarking that a young woman’s grief-stricken response to the death of her husband is a ‘typical depressive reaction’: ‘Her grief and mourning are looked upon as a pathological syndrome. The basic decisions are of a ...”

“... Dick, has been landed with his opprobrious nickname because of a regrettable accident which took place in his childhood: the nickname celebrates ironically the fact that he shot a pregnant woman dead, with a shot discharged at random out of the cupola of the family home. But it is the very guilt which attaches to this random and intrinsically absurd ...”