“... there wasn’t any controversy: there was a crisis, for example, over the US installation of an X-ray imaging system known as CargoScan at Votkinsk in the spring of 1990: the Soviet Union was concerned that it might damage the propellant in its non-treaty-limited missiles. But rather than allow their differences to undermine the treaty, both parties continued ...”

“... it were, the dose of bismuth which makes the position of the intestine apparent on the X-ray screen”,’ we are encouraged to see him as an anxious husband: ‘This image derives, surely, from Vivien’s “intestine” having been diagnosed recently as “so nearly dead”.’ Crawford is probably right about the bismuth, but it’s the wrong kind ...”

“... Laurens van der Post and the born-again Brian Griffiths, embittered outcasts like Enoch Powell and Ray Honeyford, men like Bernard Ingham and John Hoskyns whose previous Labour sympathies made them oddities in the Tory camp, émigrés from Britain like Alan Walters, Ian MacGregor and Robert Conquest. Her Jewish Cabinet members were by definition marginal men ...”

“... sadly make us doubt their scholarly credentials. Jo Gladstone’s interesting study of John Ray quotes a passage that she attributes to Bishop Wilkins when it is, in fact, from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, and elsewhere she says that Thomas Blount ‘first used the title term “hard words’ ” when, in fact, it appears in the title of the ...”

“... of Keller’s essays makes, implicitly, the same claim. I believe it cannot be sustained. The man’s magnetism was almost wholly personal; and I would like to evoke and celebrate it before turning in more detail to the book which so regrettably fails to enclose it. During my teens and student days Hans Keller was already an established fact, stimulation ...”

“... have made more enemies in these two years than in ten years of editing the Cornhill. One man signed himself the other day “your justly incensed enemy” – because I had not asked him to write articles already assigned to others and he is not an extreme example of the antiquarian.’ As copy started to arrive, Stephen wailed over ‘the insane ...”

“... an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a ...”

“... mild-mannered, imperturbable, sucking juice out of a Waffle House cup. He is a 50-year-old black man with a short moustache and a gap between his teeth. He was born in Pitt County but spent his happiest days in Atlanta. Terry sat at the counter of the Waffle House waiting for a decision. It turned out he needed more than Yolande to cover his shifts, so we ...”

“... a letter stops to talk – and what enables him to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I ...”

“... by ‘the students and faculty’ of Harvard – and a juggernaut containing $15,000 worth of X-ray equipment, autoclaves, an operating table and a generator. By the end of the month, when the Republican government set its heart on the capture of Teruel, Neugass was part of a mobile AMB infirmary consisting of 17 vehicles. Neugass himself drove ‘a long ...”

“... in my mind until ten weeks after the War had broken out. When it did recur to me it was as if a ray of light had struck a sensitised plate.’ In September 1914, very soon after the outbreak of war, Swinton was instructed by Kitchener, whom he had known in South Africa, to travel immediately to France as an official Eyewitness and write a series of reports ...”

“... was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. But what was going on in his mind is a matter for speculation. In October 1940, his asthma exacerbated by the dust from the bombing, he left London and moved to a ...”

“... Warhol wasn’t interested in the play, but he did want to cast Solanas in an erotic film, I, a Man. On the day she shot Warhol, Solanas rode the six floors with her victim in the elevator up to his office. ‘Solanas’s bullets,’ the Times reported, ‘punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, oesophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him ...”

“... of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in ...”

“... 1960s pop-rock before its larky brashness got lost in earnest philosophising. I see the young Ray Davies – an ambiguous girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much ...”