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“... narrative. Drawing on elements as disparate as Alexander Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales and Stephen Hecht’s scholarly paper ‘Tobacco Carcinogens, Their Biomarkers and Tobacco-Induced Cancer’, Red Plenty is a seamless pastiche. It takes the long view of Soviet history, although Spufford’s view is highly selective. Sputniks and cosmonauts go ...”

“... cheered Orwell up in his last three months, according to Anthony Powell, though it greatly annoyed Stephen Spender, who resented being told by a snip of a girl to limit his political conversation with G.O. to twenty minutes. Her next marriage was in 1958 to Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been jailed four years earlier in the scandalous homosexuality trial that ...”

“... struggle’, all ‘Eros and Thanatos’ and ‘solitary acts of personal liberation’. Teaching Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, he finds his students unwilling to recognise ‘the vitalism on which Red Badge turned, the priesthood of the life force, the riddle of blood and sacrifice’. So he obliquely prescribes William James’s essay ‘The ...”

“... second that he was an engineer. The Viennese background, brilliantly documented by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, alerts us to the linguistic and moral preoccupations that Wittgenstein shared with others of his generation before ever coming into the orbit of Frege and Russell. And the physics and engineering provide the key to the ...”

“... best accommodate her. Like ‘Shingle’ in the United States, English ‘Queen Anne’ offered a small-scale house in which comfort, style and convenience were combined. And there, like so many of us, Rybczynski would have been glad to leave the story of ‘home’: a tale of ‘gradual evolution’ which has successfully accommodated the disappearance of ...”

“... is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover ...”

“... from Egypt to Europe this year.’ For Brussels, Sisi’s waxing authoritarianism appears a small price to pay for his perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant unemployment, especially among the young. As the Dutch president, Mark Rutte, put it in Cairo, ‘sometimes you have to dance with whoever’s on the dance floor.’ Some ...”

“... arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as The Letters ...”

“... and an overnight connection that brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’ who said they were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her friends followed suit and met someone in the ...”

“... can be trained to distinguish fraudulent from bona fide transactions. However, if fraud occurs in small distant purchases and in large local ones, as in Figure 1, the task of classification is too complex. The approach only works with problems that are ‘linearly separable’ and, as should be clear from Figure 1, no single straight line will separate the ...”

“... segue comes in various sizes (that was a medium). This sentence ending would qualify as a small: Einstein, replying in 1915 to a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, was ‘unaware that he was writing to a dead man’. It’s a true statement – if Einstein had known he was writing to a dead man he would presumably have stopped – but the piquant hint of ...”

“... reference works, universities. His languages were English and Latin, and Kiessling notes the small holdings in other tongues. By its very breadth it seems to describe the crisis facing an intellectual culture based essentially upon the mastery of all of the available texts, and the same may be said of his great work, The Anatomy of Melancholy. We are ...”

“... the Edinburgh and Quarterly. These were long and serious to a fault, and catered to a public as small as the journals were high-minded. Politically-motivated, the quarterlies were liable to subordinate independent judgment to party ends. Anonymity ensured that the reviewer for his part subordinated personality to the collective self of the journal. There ...”

“... them, blacks, several Orientals, people who could have been Mexicans. The drums were struck, a small chant rose to the sky, and they began marching alongside the highway. They were as ragged, as obscure, as devout and self-involved, as some medieval band on an old woodcut. One might have imagined them marching from village to village, between heathlands or ...”

“... various ways, and partly indeed by intimidation, as has already been suggested. But, as Sir James Stephen remarked in 1886, ‘a very small amount of shooting in the leg will effectively deter an immense mass of people from paying rents which they do not want to pay.’ This quotation, as Dr Townshend points out, focuses ...”