“... price of standards is eternal vigilance.’ Contingency and struggle were the drivers of Thomas Pynchon’s great metrological novel Mason & Dixon, as they are of Crease’s book, whose special strength is attention to the last several decimal places of modern measurements, how they were arrived at through the 19th ...”

“... however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more important figure, because he is the exemplar for a thesis which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern ...”

“... most pervasive form of American mass culture’, playing to audiences on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. For some cultural historians, America is founded on the original sin of genocide; for Rogin, the sin is slavery. Blackface is a product of European imperialism and worse – a shocking form of dehumanisation, a vampire rite in which one people enacts ...”

“... he ‘used to live in the Paradise Valley in Montana with my literary friends Richard Ford and Thomas McGuane’. Some weeks later, I met Richard Ford at a wedding, and I asked him about Harris. Ford squinted and said: ‘Don Harris . . . Don Harris . . .’ Then he raised his hands and shouted: ‘Don Harris is a fugitive from justice! He fled the ...”

“... apocryphal notion that Anne Boleyn’s hair was claimed by Jean Rombaud, who had been employed by Thomas Cromwell to cut off her head, and sold on to stuff tennis balls. This is a crowded area of historical fiction: quite apart from the many shelves of Boleyniana and the boom in Cromwell studies, Rombaud has been the subject of a novel (C.C. Humphreys’s The ...”

“... in getting it to stay; and in terms of fixing, his process was not yet an emphatic advance on what Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy had achieved in 1802. His prints were faint and liable to fade; he could stabilise the image but not fix it permanently. In February 1839, Herschel persuaded Talbot that there was no point in guarding his own secret due to ‘the ...”

“... to plunder Ireland, under the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the ...”