“... preface starring Einstein), then proceeds biographically from one great man of science to another: William Herschel, who discovered Uranus in 1781; Pierre-Simon Laplace, who showed that ‘the dynamics of the solar system … were governed by the law of gravitation as Newton had first stated it’; Le Verrier; Edison; Einstein.The ...”

“... of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street.* Byron was 23 when he wrote his first letter to Murray, in the summer after his return from ...”

“... ideas and personality, which everyone at the time – even those, like Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hunt, who were teaching him how to paint – could not stay or resist. The Germ was his brainchild, and he placed in its first number one of his most remarkable writings (and one of the signal aesthetic documents of the century), his artistic manifesto ‘Hand ...”

“... and was the leader of the anti-tsarist opposition abroad. In his essay for the new edition Arnold Hunt writes that Stepniak made Voynich the business manager of the Russian Free Press Fund, which printed revolutionary propaganda for distribution in Russia. Voynich became well known in London’s revolutionary and intellectual social circles and was thought a ...”

“... and she pleaded with Shelley to abandon his plans to sail to Livorno to meet Byron and Leigh Hunt, where they intended to discuss their new magazine, the Liberal. ‘I could not endure that he should go,’ Mary wrote. He went all the same, with Edward Williams, Daniel Roberts (the naval captain who had overseen the building of the boat) and the ‘boat ...”

“... hadn’t been treated as a hate crime. Soon afterwards he decided to make a submission to Sir William Macpherson’s inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It was this inquiry that led to the charge that there was ‘institutional racism’ in the Met. After Virdi’s reinstatement in 2000, he was unsurprisingly overlooked for promotion until ...”

“... drastic remedies that go beyond any rational scheme of reform into political vendetta and witch-hunt. In the worst of worlds, the result could be a repeat of the Fifties purge which emasculated the higher education system for a generation. The basic problem is much the same as it was in the Eisenhower years. America has for a decade had a confident ...”

“... life. In the first chapter, for example, María stands before Alfred de Dreux’s painting Deer Hunt, in which seven hounds surround a stag, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. She thinks it’s ‘fairly conventional’, but it strikes her nonetheless: ‘More than that: it unsettled me.’ She then moves from Géricault’s animal paintings to the 1881 ...”

“... to do with it. When he came under strong Congressional and White House pressure to start a new Red hunt in 1930, he argued that such a thing was strictly illegal – and since the agitators were mainly in the unions, wouldn’t it be better to hand the whole thing over to the Department of Labor? The project quietly died.Herbert Hoover’s Administration ...”

“... Tupelo. His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr ...”

“... When male life expectancy is about forty, this is decline.’ Or about the reason Leigh and John Hunt described the Prince of Wales as ‘a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country’: Wilson explains in square brackets that George III had been on the throne since 1760 although the date of the ...”

“... The British reappear in the strange voyage of the Batchelors’ Delight, 1683-5, captained by William Ambrosia Cowley and controlled by the more piratical William Dampier. A storm blew them to the Falklands – they had been ‘discoursing of the intrigues of women’, which brings bad weather – and they saw ‘foul ...”

“... the founding fathers of the socialist state were anxious, too, to get in the act, join the secret hunt for the Plan, the mystic knowledge, the buried secret. Coming on top of all this, Foucault’s pendulum itself is a trifle supererogatory, but let’s have it for good measure. It was demonstrated at the Observatoire in 1851, and afterwards at the ...”

“... he had few equals and he had an enviable knack of turning problems into solutions.’ About William Temple he writes: ‘a jovial, Oliver Hardy figure, with an appetite not merely for carbohydrates, but for social martyrdom’. About the Bloomsbury group: ‘the influence of Bloomsbury had reached upwards and downwards by the 1930s to embrace almost the ...”

“... in the 2016 election and its possible connection with the Trump campaign, submitted his report to William Barr, the US attorney general. Two days later, Barr sent a letter to Congress summarising the two main conclusions of the report. First, he quoted Mueller’s conclusion that the inquiry ‘did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or ...”