“... first of a series of compromises with the arrival in 1957 of Network Three, a hobbies-and-study service that was given 40 per cent of the Third’s hours and sought to widen the audience by courting every minority from jazz-fanciers to motoring nuts. It was instantly nicknamed ‘the fretwork network’, a sobriquet more gruesomely applicable to today’s ...”

“... and rum to the British colony of Sierra Leone. A former slave trader, Benson now worked in the service of abolition, and his concern about the wet goods was not simply for his own fortune; he also worried for the cause of ‘legitimate commerce’, one of two key concepts at the heart of Bronwen Everill’s incisive history of political economy and ...”

“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... It looked more like a postcolonial bureaucracy than anything else; there were three tiers of lunch service at its Moorgate headquarters, and executives would greet the afternoon with sherry and martinis. Authority flowed according to a ‘matrix structure’, where each operating unit answered to two layers of supervisors: the executives responsible for their ...”

“... especially the one on the Rigi. Whereas the English had at first tended to monopolise hostelry service, demanding full-scale banquets late at night, tyrannising hosts and abusing servants, all the nations of Europe now competed. At least the imperious English had forced hoteliers to brush up on hygiene and instal water closets. Serious climbers, who ...”

“... 17th-century euphemism for a post at the Court flesh market. Even among the beauties recruited to service the Royal Family, government officials and the aristocracy, Sarah and her elder sister Frances were notable. In 1673, when she was 13, she joined the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She ...”

“... and bangs and hairy bits of engineering, a sensitivity to social class and bureaucratic and service amour propre, and an awareness of the rush and eddy of history, like the winds that made a Z of the cloud over Monte Bello. We all know now that detonating atomic bombs in the atmosphere is a bad thing, but Cathcart does not judge his heroes by political ...”

“... duress, planters felt compelled to adopt new measures and assume new attitudes (giving lip service to frugality, for example) in order ‘to regain personal honour and independence’. Some hoped to become solvent by moving to fresh lands in the Piedmont. Others, like George Washington, switched from tobacco to wheat, thereby transforming themselves ...”

“... During my solitary evenings I have been reading the two volumes of Thomas Hardy’s biography by Robert Gittings. I have just finished it and this recalls to me Hardy’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, which I actually attended. Or rather the funeral of most of him: his heart had been left behind in Dorsetshire. I suppose I was one of the ...”

“... heavily at lunchtime and fell asleep during afternoon meetings; he liked to play with guns; after Robert Kennedy ordered a halt to all operations against Cuba during the missile crisis Harvey sent in teams of agents; once in an office discussion he pulled a 45, pointed it at someone who disagreed with him, and released the safety catch. This nutcase held ...”

“... peers. ‘He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this,’ Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos project, wrote to a colleague. Another eminent elder physicist, Eugene Wigner, described him as ‘a second Dirac, only this time human’. The rest of Feynman’s career was spent in academic physics, first at ...”

“... earlier than his, Clarence is undergoing a painful loss of faith, brought on by reading Robert Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses and other scornful and persuasive incitements to infidelity. His life is ruined, and Updike tells us, with characteristic thoroughness, why this was so and what it felt like. ‘Life’s sounds all rang with a curious ...”

“... biography and paraphrase; de Botton generates almost four pages by rearranging sentences from Robert Baldick’s translation of A rebours. And when all else fails, the literary pose gives licence to cod-Proustian long-windedness, replete with ‘it is perhaps’, ‘that which’ and the bogus ‘precisely’. Here, for example, is how he expresses the ...”

“... 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the entire works of Syd Field, and just about every other book ever written that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the self-described ...”

“... to experiment. It plays host to some unlikely double acts, with the ‘sentency stanzas’ of Robert Frost found alongside the ‘stanzaic sentences’ of Gertrude Stein, and it stretches from Whitman to Ashbery, both innovators in poetical-paragraphical style – ‘big blocks of words, prosy chunks that in the sequential and cumulative effects can be ...”