“... golf balls can fit in a school bus?’ or ‘How much does the Empire State Building weigh?’ David Schwartz​ is a science policy expert with a background in physics. His father was the Nobel-winning physicist Melvin Schwartz, who met Fermi in the 1950s and passed on his admiration of the great man. But beyond the physics, as Schwartz admits at the ...”

“... which plainly made Russia a potential antagonist. Shortly after the defeat of Napoleon, the young Grand Duke Nicholas had come to England. Lady Charlotte Campbell found him ‘devilish handsome’, while others, less frivolously, thought that he might one day put Russia on the Western path of enlightenment. Alas, when Nicholas succeeded as tsar in 1825, he ...”

“... to spare description of physical actions and enigmatic moments. Rather than returning to the grand historical reconstructions of Underworld or Libra (1989) – to which readers might uncharitably compare Falling Man’s apparent smallness – it seems that in Falling Man DeLillo has produced a revision of an influential ‘small’ book he delivered ...”

“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... using it, probably fewer than in some other sports. Just before the Tour began, the British rider David Millar – very popular in France, almost unknown in Britain – confessed to taking EPO. He has now been stripped of his world time-trial title. This is the first time since 1978 that no British rider has taken part in the Tour. Suspicions about Armstrong ...”

“... were allotted to elected deputies of the people.Chief Pleas has consistently been suspicious of grand plans for reform. This is because tax increases would fall mainly on inhabited property, given tenants’ centuries-old opposition to a bureaucracy capable of administering an inquisitorial income tax. Tenant resistance on grounds of cost delayed all the ...”

“... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...”

“... Harpo and Gummo. Minnie came along for the ride and, as their business manager, felt sufficiently grand to rename herself Minnie Palmer. On a gig one night in Waukegan, Illinois – fabled town: was it not the Waukegan conservatory that taught Jack Benny the violin? – the brothers looked past the footlights and saw at the piano, inexplicably, the wandering ...”

“... for years. It is the story of a fearless leader surrounded by shadowy forces and intrigue, of grand conspiracies to thwart the will of the people who elected him. A narrative in which Mr Trump, even before a gunman tried to take his life, was already a martyr.History often starts with a photo. The transfer from digital capture to T-shirt might take less ...”

“... ruthlessness in those pursuits. The Oxford first in History, accomplished with the guidance of David Hogarth, later a senior archaeological colleague, then a fellow officer, included a study of Crusader castles done in the field, which involved an examination of the Syrian citadel, Krak des Chevaliers, then little-known in Britain. This suggests ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... vituperation was sustained by, among others, a retired member of the Burmese Civil Service named David Alec Wilson, who sent forth a six-volume corrective to Froude which Kaplan rightly calls ‘a historical grotesquerie, a mass of undigested and unevaluated documentation whose main purpose was to prove that Carlyle was a saint and Froude a liar’. It took ...”

“... poets to play the role of politicians; it was they who had formulated demands and programmes. His grand quarrel with the idée reçue of Poland was thus, in particular, a quarrel with the romantic poets. Norwid rejected their exaltation of the national question into an absolute, their insistence on the priority of the collective – the nation – over the ...”

“... to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes ...”