“... and marvels. What made these experimenters different from their predecessors was their equally strong commitment to publicity and discipline. Della Porta had once explained that ‘if you would have your works appear more wonderful, you must not let the cause be known.’ The 17th-century masters of new kinds of laboratories had to steer a path between the ...”

“... Samson as a moral exemplar of suffering under corrupt monarchy, Wren wondered how the Israelite strong man had pulled off his famous trick. Concerned, at the time, with St Paul’s collapsing roofs, he offered a cunning analysis of the way in which a Philistine temple might have been pulled down by one blind but vigorous human. Tinniswood sees his ...”

“... country in the world, Britain is changing, but in few developed countries do people have such a strong feeling that every change is for the worse. Britain is plagued by a mood of cultural pessimism that brings to mind France of the 1870s. Every event – a nasty murder in Liverpool, the death of Bobby Moore, a Royal tryst – is sucked into a nightmare ...”

“... cheese. He spoke with ‘clear, gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine’.‘Apostasy’ is a strong term, though it was often used of Wordsworth at the time (he privately complained about critics ‘who have dealt so liberally with the ...”

“... ever to say why. As before, the characters are utterly distinct, yet without any emphatic lines or strong colours. They have forgotten what it is like to be even partly in control of their own lives, for the huge network of wartime circumstance has taken charge of them. The scene is still the Near East, the world still that of British Council lecturers, minor ...”

“... The five videotapes of Simon Schama’s BBC 2 series Landscape and Memory must have been sent to me in a wrapping all too suspiciously plain. They never arrived, nicked, we presume, by a postal worker with a thing for blue movies. I like to think he wasn’t too disappointed. There was a lot more drapery than he could have wished or expected: in each of the programmes I remembered to record myself, the entire studio had been wrapped in muslin or bunting, by a designer whose notions of landscape art were mainly derived from Christo’s ...”

“... Patrick has been hired by an obnoxiously trendy mismated publisher. He labours scornfully for this Simon Giles, faintly comforted by a corner in Classical studies which has been granted him for reasons to do with the firm’s image. Between Patrick and Mrs Giles there flows, or gutters, a current of dreary sexual electricity. He fancies that ...”

“... with Hardy’s beloved prime numbers playing a leading role. How this came about is the subject of Simon Singh’s The Code Book, a very readable and skilfully told history of cryptography. Singh’s method is to attach the abstract ideas involved to someone who thought of them, failed to think of them, championed them, or suffered their consequences – this ...”

“... the court of Weimar. Hilmes’s account of these two central relationships is one of his book’s strong points. He gives space to the background stories of both women and is sympathetic both towards Liszt’s peculiar tolerance of their difficult personalities and towards the personalities themselves. For Marie d’Agoult, who was orphaned at 14, brought up ...”

“... This isn’t a new paradox, but it’s one that doesn’t lose its sting. Gay men make a strong showing in the novels of Iris Murdoch, with Michael in The Bell (1958) judged not on the basis of his orientation but for his refusal of the claim love made on him. Axel and Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) are ...”

“... than half a century. In 2009 governments acted on that understanding. This policy nevertheless had strong opponents. In the US Obama’s stimulus package was opposed by the Republicans, and in the UK the Conservatives objected to Labour’s measures. They focused on the rising budget deficit caused by the recession, which any fiscal stimulus would only ...”

“... and phallic cakes. Some care was taken to distinguish different kinds of penis in art, and a strong contrast seems always to have been drawn between the gross members of satyrs and comic actors in Dionysus’ entourage and the very modest manhood of heroic and civic ideal. Sometimes the phallus seems even to have a life of its own. It appears as a ...”

“... of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989. At first glance it looks as if the reader gets a smaller return, a mere 15 years of history at a point when, on the face of it, nothing dramatic was happening. In fact, the big problems Johnson offers to explain prove ...”

“... quantified on a 100-point scale. Among the founding fathers of this modern vocabulary were André Simon, Alexis Lichine and A.J. Liebling, whose New Yorker pieces included stuff like the following, about a modest southern French rosé: ‘Tavel has a rose-cerise “robe”, like a number of well-known racing silks, but its taste is not thin or acidulous, as ...”

“... Dublin of 1925 and grows in that year from girl to young woman by force of staying at home. This strong, clever novel (Clare Boylan’s first) goes over much familiar ground of childhood – the convent school, pubescence, sex education, weak mother, aggressive father, bad-talking cook, skeleton in familial trunk – with a fresh and exciting tread. Lisa St ...”