“... a kind of celebrity in this period that they probably could not have attained before or after. As Jonathan Rose has observed about the explosion of print towards the close of the 19th century: ‘Lord Salisbury’s oft-quoted sneer – “Written by office boys for office boys” – accurately summed up a revolutionary social fact: journalism had opened an ...”

“... got American technology, which was increasingly becoming more important to sigint than mere mental power, and which did require great material resources – mostly to build and launch orbital satellites. (Britain’s attempt to compete with the US here, the Zircon project, collapsed in 1987.) But the alliance came at a price. Britain’s foreign policy was ...”

“... newspapers in 1800, as if to provide a pleasant distraction from Napoleon’s centralisation of power, and then spread throughout Europe, taking on, according to Kraus, each language’s, and country’s, worst attributes. In Germany it became pedantic and moralising; in Austria-Hungary melodramatically moody and snobbishly refined. Kraus compared the ...”

“... face’. He was amazed that this brilliant man, who had seen ‘so many people defeated by age, power and success and written so convincingly about them should have fallen into the trap set by life’. In Julian Evans’s depiction of the Havana scene in Semi-Invisible Man, we begin to understand the force of Hemingway’s decline and its effect on ...”

“... were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find ...”

“... artistic spirit; but not all artists have viewed their trade in this high-minded manner. Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson would have been dismayed by this grandiose inflation of their literary hackwork. And who knows how Aeschylus or the author of Beowulf regarded their craft? It would be rash to assume that they thought of it in the same way Shelley ...”

“... provided ‘matter to feed and fertilise the mind’. London sights could ‘feed me without a power of satiating me’. Of dreams, he said that ‘we love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies.’ He savoured experience, and so ...”

“... reason: he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only ...”

“... like a fulfilment of prophecy, bringing closer the Second Advent and the overthrow of American power. To what extent the FBI negotiators were aware of this I do not know. Although Seventh-Day Adventist eschatology has a certain superficial similarity to that of Zoroastrianism, the deeper connections are indirect, mediated in the first instance by Paradise ...”

“... can’t be a legend, you have to be older.’ Thomson is not dealing in legend, though, but in the power of desire. Kidman isn’t just a star, or even a legend; she is a hegemon. How did she achieve the status she has now, at the top of the A-list of Hollywood actresses, and how has she kept it for so long? If you think Kidman doesn’t deserve a whole ...”

“... of mystic truth, is ultimately far more important and influential in shaping man’s fate than the power game of those with political aspirations who try to change the world directly.’ A highly debatable point of view, of course, and one with which Perutz, to judge by Is science necessary?, wouldn’t agree. While Delbrück’s non-technical writings mainly ...”

“... that she was considered exceptionally beautiful, and that her beauty endowed her with enormous power. As her paintings (in the style of the Decadents of the 1890s) began to be noticed in the annual salons, she also began to work on what Burke calls ‘the creation of a mannered self-image corresponding to the stylisation of her art’. Following in Oscar ...”

“... Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the fruit of conscientious industry combined with the power of vivid and coherent delineation’, the DNB was established as an abidingly useful and incomparably wide-ranging work of reference. But it also reflected the limitations of its age and the prejudices of its creators. Written at a time when there was no ...”

“... to an older Anglican or Catholic tradition of nature-writing. In Romantic Ecology (1991), Jonathan Bate made a useful case, more solid than Roe’s, for the adoption of Wordsworth along with Ruskin by, say the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, as the twin John the Baptists of respectable English conservationism. This line of thought is ...”

“... compacted, perfectly artful, little commentary on the absurdity of human perseverance and the power of accident. The duo’s terrible task with the piano seems to serve as a motif not just for their relationship but for their entire lives. They are hopeless, and when they finally get the piano into the house, well, of course, the owner says it’s come to ...”