“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”

“... School of painting in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ...”

“... large slogan blazoning CIVIL WAR, a vast floor-to-ceiling map of England, marking the sites of the major battles, another information panel, plus eight suits of armour fixed like trophies to the wall. The wood-block floor has been covered with some ‘period-feel’ black and white squared linoleum. The museological debates that such a contrast raises hardly ...”

“... per cent of the sample who admitted to having more than one sex partner in the previous year. The major weakness of the American report, however, is that the sample, a mere 3400 respondents, is too small. For example, the data on homosexuality are based on a sample of only the 150 women and 143 men who reported any same-gender sexuality. Originally designed ...”

“... England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially ...”

“... is the current in a tuning circuit or the velocity of a weight suspended from a spring. The major difficulty in communicating scientific ideas to a non-professional audience, therefore, is the lack of a common mathematical language. Eigen and Winkler attempt to bridge this language gap. The concepts they aim to explain are not the relatively simple ...”

“... writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... organised teams of scholars. One might add that this is a job which could not have been done in a major library, not the Folger, nor the Huntington, nor the Bodleian, nor the British – or not from their own resources. It could only have been done in a place with access to the complete Short-Title Catalogue series of University Micro-film from Ann ...”

“... which can be incarnated, realised in the historical persons of individual human beings? A major difficulty in seeing how to answer this question is an ambiguity, within the concept of authority itself, between the idea of social efficacy and the idea of moral or cognitive validity. By vulgarly quantitative criteria of social efficacy, two of the five ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits ...”

“... in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If ...”

“... His father, who had served at Coruña and Waterloo, was a half-pay captain and briefly acting-major. As Major Jones, he existed on very small commons, while striving long and unhopefully to return to full pay. He had married for money, but it never materialised. He was not only sick, but on poor terms with the Duke, his ...”

“... around six in the morning to the sound of distant horses. Still in those days billeted in St John’s Wood the King’s Troop regularly exercised in Regent’s Park which would occasionally bring them along Oval Road and down the crescent. The ancient sound of horsemen carried in the early morning air so one would hear the troop long before they cantered ...”

“... withdrew, only to appear again at Lisburn barracks, where he identified himself as an intelligence major who had driven all the way from Armagh to Belfast to meet the new recruit. The major, Holroyd reflects in this book, ‘seemed to have no idea of what he was doing or why he was doing it’. These inauspicious early ...”