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“... seemed to be upwards of five thousand persons – ‘the size of the Jacobite army under Prince Charles Edward Stuart’, noted the Scotsman’s reporter – assembled on the tableland for the 250th birthday. Around 10 a.m. the queue of motor carriages stretched back down into Inverness. After a dry winter the sombre morass was a lot more walkable than ...”

“... regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de Varenne you are struck by ...”

“... official report into the Met’s failure to solve the 1987 murder of a private investigator called Daniel Morgan accused the force of ‘institutional corruption’. Morgan was found with an axe in his head in the car park of a South London pub frequented by police officers. Despite four murder investigations and an inquest, no one has been convicted of the ...”

“... was a reasonable expectation that she would find her place in Poets’ Corner, near the grave of Charles Dickens and the bust of Thackeray. Why has it taken a century to bring this about? In giving notice of her death her husband, John Walter Cross, who had married her in St George’s, Hanover Square, scarcely eight months before, alluded to her wish to be ...”

“... actually made things worse. This thesis was popularised in the influential book Losing ground, by Charles Murray, published in 1984. Murray noted the inconclusive findings of social research. He pointed out that since 1965 generous rates of social security benefit had been available to workers and non-workers alike. He claimed that these benefits had ...”

“... Most people know that Charles Babbage was a pioneer of the computer. This absorbing, though hagiographical, new life makes very clear how many other things he was as well: pure mathematician, economist, inventor, reformer of scientific institutions, craftsman, even salon host. But Anthony Hyman does not seek to displace the computers from centre-stage in Babbage’s life, and this seems correct ...”

“... and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking Ladino, the ‘largely medieval Spanish of the Sephardim’. Bulgarian was the language used by the family servants. However, while Canetti, his family and friends spoke ...”

“... An earlier novelist whom Fowles does certainly admire and perhaps emulate is the danger-courting Daniel Defoe, deceitful but ‘sounding true’. Then, if we look through the genuine pages of ‘Historical Chronicle, 1736’ reproduced in A Maggot, we find that the running story is about Major Porteous who fired into an Edinburgh mob during the year and was ...”

“... that all men might see that she was with child’. What was it these men saw? It was reported to Charles V that his daughter-in-law was exhibiting the ‘customary symptoms’ of pregnancy: her colouring, ‘the state of her breasts’, the fact that her dresses no longer did up. She was expected to give birth in May 1555; a nursery was prepared and a cradle ...”

“... what? The story of gravity, and especially of gravitational waves, has been far from clear-cut; as Daniel Kennefick points out in Travelling at the Speed of Thought, Einstein’s ‘first reaction on the completion of his theory was to conclude that gravitational waves do not exist’. The majority opinion now is that they do, even though no definitive ...”

“... and it’s good enough for you.’ But with the research organised by such bodies as the Institut Charles-de-Gaulle and the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent bringing together those who knew and who worked with the General and historians with an interest in establishing their own analyses and narratives, we are able to proceed to new assessments both of ...”

“... was replaced by the Irish Free State, but Northern Ireland is with us still.In The Partition, Charles Townshend aims to explain how Ulster came to be conceived of as an entity requiring special treatment, even if people couldn’t agree on what, if anything, should be done about it, or on what exactly Ulster was. Townshend’s main focus is on British ...”

“... with publishers and through the journal Modern Poetry in Translation which he founded with Daniel Weissbort).It is, however, his letters to Plath that are the outstanding feature of this volume. The first letter (March 1956) is very brief:Sylvia,That night was nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory of it goes through me like ...”

“... an extraordinary act of devotion, two of Saussure’s former students at the University of Geneva, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, undertook to collate the course notes of students who were enrolled in one or another of Saussure’s three pedagogical attempts at a ‘course of general linguistics’ in 1907-8, 1908-9 and 1910-11, together with the few ...”

“... piracy by a judge and jury and sentenced according to law. Although he knows of the Gordon case, Daniel Heller-Roazen appears not to understand all this. Since his chair at Princeton is in comparative literature, this would be unsurprising if his book were what for much of its length it appears to be: an elegantly composed and widely researched survey of the ...”