“... may be thought to have gone out of him once it became obvious that he was not going to die young. Wells’s most famous imaginative device, the time machine, is relevant to this, since the Time Traveller is in effect cheating death by voyaging forward in another dimension. Did Wells himself make some such jump into hyperdrive, becoming a prophet of the ...”

“... of ghosts themselves. In the 1940s a vicar reported that he had been embraced by a ‘naked young woman’: in earlier days this wouldn’t have been admitted to the record of the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, on moral grounds if on no other. Finucane concludes that the suffering souls of purgatory are more understandable, not as ...”

“... of a Bulgarian count whose recreation was to ride to hounds after a human quarry, preferably a young gypsy woman with a child at her breast. The hunt would end with the count coming to orgasm as he watched woman and baby being torn to pieces. Finally ‘everything was silent and the waters of the estuary turned carnation-red as the hounds ate their ...”

“... end of history simply contribute another event to the history they declare over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only ...”

“... understood. He is the first, I believe, to draw attention to some curious dealings between Captain Francis Austen and the directors of the East India Company and he notes that Austen’s career did not suffer thereby: yet he recognises that the Admiralty and the Company then cooperated in a manner that might later have been thought improper. He deals fairly ...”

“... of Labour Market Experience of Youth. Starting in 1979, this survey has been tracking about 12,500 young Americans, following not only their family background, education, employment, marriage and child-bearing, but measuring their IQ. This unique resource enables our authors to show that IQ is a fairly good predictor of many social variables – educational ...”

“... the pureness, the quick observant vision, the ready sensibility, the devotedness’ of her work. Francis Jeffreys claimed that Hemans was the example of ‘female poetry’: the ‘tenderness’ and ‘ethereal purity of sentiment’ he saw in her ‘could only emanate from the soul of woman’. ‘I never saw any one so exquisitely feminine,’ Jewsbury ...”

“... This question has provoked intellectual disagreement for over a century, beginning in 1884 with Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius, continuing through the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, and culminating in the loudest recent salvos, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell ...”

“... dramatised Harrison’s relations with younger scholars – notably, D.S. MacColl, R.A. Neil and Francis Cornford – as painful scenarios in which she was always the loser. Yet Harrison, too, was inclined to see herself as repeatedly betrayed and heartbroken. Beard is uncomfortable with her claims to victim status, and hurries over these unedifying ...”

“... the 5000 inhabitants exposed to infection, 99.5 per cent caught the disease. John Enders and his young associate T.C. Peebles were the first to grow measles virus in the test tube in 1954, using the tissue culture techniques developed by Enders and his colleagues in the late 1940s. Much good that did him at Harvard. Even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize ...”

“... Halliwell fell in love with and married the baronet’s daughter. Thereafter Phillipps hated the young man implacably, and did all he could to damage him and his wife. Halliwell nevertheless went on with his work, much of which was of biographical importance. When Phillipps died in 1872, his son-in-law, to comply with the terms of the baronet’s ...”

“... captured loot worth five times England’s annual revenue, she knighted her favourite privateer, Francis Drake, on his main deck. Subsequent plans ‘to annoy the king of Spain’ involved giving aid to his Dutch and Portuguese enemies and, in December 1585, sending an expeditionary force to the Netherlands under the command of another favourite, the Earl of ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures ...”