“... English versions of the books of secrets could be picked up from dealers like the pharmacist John Hester, whose shop acted as an important centre of recipes and useful lore, while on stage Marlowe had Faustus, an avid reader of these books, abandon law and divinity for the science which gave him the secret of universal mastery. Works on ...”

“... of his own disappearance into fiction. As he watches the rehearsals for I Am a Camera, the play John van Druten made from the Isherwood material, Isherwood thinks a good deal – sometimes comically, sometimes sentimentally – about the relation of art to life. In writing Goodbye to Berlin I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... had instead renounced Mrs Simpson, he would probably have moved on to the next married woman who took his fancy, then the next one after that. And if the present queen had decided to call it a day at 70, then King Charles III and his mistress would by now already be installed in Buckingham Palace. It is impossible to know whether the British monarchy would ...”

“... English institutions and wanted to preserve them exactly as they were. He was shocked when Sir John Donaldson, in charge of the National Industrial Relations Court, dispensed with gown and wig: wigs, gowns and flummery were the essence of the law. He not only opposed any notion that the free-market principles preached to the rest of the nation might apply ...”

“... Hobbesian and ‘antique-modern’ tradition of Roman law. Against the antique-modernists, Gierke took as his starting-point the assumption in medieval German law that the group was always prior to the whole, and that the rights and identity of individuals were inconceivable outside a community or corporation. Whatever was ‘genuinely medieval starts from ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... happened, but the viewer still receives a very clear sense of the circumstances in which tragedies took place. In a similar vein, Luis Camnitzer, a Uruguayan artist now living in New York, exhibited a set of apparently innocuous photographs called the Uruguayan Torture Series, each of which was accompanied by a handwritten English sentence. A photograph of a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... engineers – under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances are compelled to act like heroes. John le Carré once called him ‘the source on which we all draw’. Alan Furst has been drawing on him for nearly twenty years: ‘The first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler,’ he told an interviewer when that novel came out ...”