“... Lane Fox does at several points make clear, however, the scope of what is revealed if we grant his re-dating scheme. Epidemics 1 and 3 – originally a single treatise, divided in two by later scribes – becomes ‘the earliest datable example of a medical text for practitioners and students … It even becomes the first Greek prose text which ...”

“... Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains with nice elaboration that, with women, Hughes ‘preferred intermammary intercourse – making love between a woman’s breasts – or fellatio to ...”

“... I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is ...”

“... inaccurate. Credit tends to gravitate to the senior scientists because it is they who sit on the grant and prize committees and they tend to assume the lab chief deserves credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the ...”

“... When Charles II died in 1685 without legitimate offspring, the throne passed to his brother James, Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile in France as a Catholic and who now began publicly attending mass. Within a few months the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion and Baron Jeffreys’s judicial revenge, the Bloody Assizes, spread fear that ...”

“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... in the first session of Congress offer a variation on the theme. What did men like John Adams and James Madison accomplish in the first legislature? The state needed funds, so the great political theorists haggled and horse-traded about whom to tax. First there was a proposed levy on molasses. The Virginians suggested six cents per gallon, New England, which ...”

“... except the financial. You can mine a whole seam of Postmodern irony in the consideration that Cary Grant and Rock Hudson were both faced with at least as tortuous a journey towards usurping the standard masculine gender pattern as their female opposite numbers, but what matters is that for the Doris Day character in Pillow Talk the ideal lay in ...”

“... materialised, or not in the way he’d been led to expect. When she did finally make a substantial grant to the university, she put a clause in the deed allowing her to do whatever she wanted with the money, including withdrawing it for her own benefit. She prevented Jordan from paying competitive salaries, and pestered him about petty expenditures such as the ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... previous stint as attorney general, under George H.W. Bush, he had supported Bush’s decision to grant pardons to six Iran-Contra defendants indicted for crimes ranging from perjury to obstruction of justice. The Senate debate on Barr’s confirmation attached very little importance to this fact.Given the fervent expectations that Mueller inspired (‘It’s ...”

“... off from New York to Ireland to find out whether or not he is the great-great-grandson of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Jamie’s father had once halfheartedly tried this, but he wasn’t prey to a sufficiently insatiable hunger for the quest. But then it is Jamie, not his father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in an heirloom daguerrotype which ...”

“... windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas. Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the ...”

“... he has to show, and does show, the teenager eagerly approaching a distinguished man of letters, James Ashcroft Noble (‘my note-book would show you that I am not wasting my time out of doors at least’), his dissipations at Oxford, the complexity, beauty and bloody-mindedness of his love for Helen Noble, the disheartening untidiness of life in a cottage ...”

“... won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities. He was Britain’s ...”