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“... came out, his face and body gleaming, he found Elizabeth had made the bed and was sitting at the foot of it. Only after he took from his side of the built-in wardrobe a pair of underpants and put them on did he feel he could go to Elizabeth, lean over and kiss her lips. She stared at him when he stepped back. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m no doubt ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... Peter Sutcliffe for the 13 murders he committed in the North of England between 1975 and 1980, Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney-General, rose to tell the Judge that the Crown was dropping the charge of murder in favour of a guilty plea for manslaughter. Havers said that all the evidence tended towards the conclusion that ‘this is a case of diminished ...”

“... the roof and the drains v. the spectacular flower arrangements in the front hall (‘22-foot-high flower arrangements ... costing some £20,000 p.a. were part of the scheme. They looked stunning’). If Mrs Oldham had been able to see what Strong wrote in his diaries and to read his relentless tales of partying around the fringes of royalty, her ...”

“... playing for his university team, working as a coach-instructor at resorts and tennis camps. At six foot three, with unusually long arms and legs and a wiry muscular body, he was transmuted into an intimidating modern player at the age of 14: I was never able to get more than a game or two per set from him after that because the difference between us – I have ...”

“... a physicist and eminent populariser of science told the producer that whereas a genius such as Michael Faraday would have been awarded three different Nobel Prizes had they then existed, Maxwell would only have won one. No room for him on Auntie’s Olympus. I have no idea which of Maxwell’s achievements might have gained this anachronistic reward: his ...”

“... Auchinleck’s Scotland, for all the David Humes and Adam Smiths and Hugh Blairs, still had one foot in times when family feuds were settled by the spear and the firing of houses. To the old taunt, Boswell’s guts responded in the old way. Meanwhile Boswell went on wrestling vainly with his own choices in life. He wanted to be a Member of Parliament, but ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... A pistoleer had two or three shots against the musketeer’s one, he could fire them at ten-foot range where armour was no protection, and if he missed even his enemy’s horse he could just ride away. The Reiters cleared heavy cavalry off the battlefield (as a result of the complex but only moderately costly technology of the wheel-lock); with them out ...”

“... their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ On the other hand, decaying flesh could transmit the holiness of the soul it once sheltered through contact relics. Dirt from a grave, water in which a saint had been washed for burial, straw ...”

“... differential equations, which caused millions of animals to be needlessly killed during the 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak. But the work of B.S. Cooper and his colleagues is simple, biologically plausible, and persuasive. In an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, ‘Methicillin-Resistant Staphyloccocus aureus in ...”

“... of the ‘cathedral window’ above the entrance; others talk about the ‘clerestory’. The 325-foot chimney tower – or ‘campanile’, as Stamp calls it – also has an ecclesiastical aspect, particularly since it is situated directly opposite the slightly higher dome of St Paul’s. And Scott himself is best known as the architect of the Anglican ...”

“... of One for My Baby is called Alfie (Parsons seems to be paying homage to characters played by Michael Caine). Alfie’s wife is called Rose. Rose dies on him. She was working in Hong Kong. In Man and Boy Harry’s misfortune led him to reassess his relationship with his young son and his parents and to fall in love with a woman who had a young daughter of ...”

“... thundering at the Bar of the House of Commons, he struck everyone as enormous: physically so, six foot two, broad-browed, broad-shouldered (in later years elephantine and ponderous of gait) and gifted with a resonant voice which could reach audiences in their thousands without any visible effort; but also eloquent, serious, immensely moral and decent. He was ...”