“... is a Titanic Dinner Show. The smaller but still substantial artefact exhibitions are lucrative: more than 25 million people have paid ($32 for an adult and $24 for a child in Las Vegas, plus tax) for the opportunity to hear ‘countless stories of heroism and humanity that pay honour to the indomitable force of the human spirit in the face of ...”

“... fruits, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, have so deep a resonance and are more closely associated with place, memory and longing.) As he was about to leave, an elderly man came down the large curving staircase. Stern struck up a conversation. His interlocutor turned out to be a former Polish cavalry officer who had survived ...”

“... father that ‘the mistake she probably made was getting married in the first place.’ Dolly sees more of what’s going on than anyone else, though she has learned to keep her own counsel. The Reid family troubles are acted out on a very public stage, with servants and neighbours and colleagues throwing themselves into the fray. The merchant Kuriatin ...”

“... for news of the allegedly infected pharmacist, but couldn’t find anything. There were three more cases in nearby villages, and the first death in Umbria was identified as Ivano Pescari, a 66-year-old accordion player from Città di Castello, ‘well known in the world of dance music’. Later that evening, the mayor announced that eight Orvietani had ...”

“... accusations, Lucia decides to eat in the canteen with the Russians and Poles, to prove she’s ‘more democratic’ than the French and Italian women who’ve been taunting her. She doesn’t realise that the segregation is enforced by the Nazis. ‘Since you love them so much,’ the foreman tells her, ‘go work with them.’ Demoted from the thermometers ...”

“... and attorneys – one of whom was, no doubt, elected to public office during the year. What’s more, three will have died of cerebral-vascular or coronary difficulties, two of cancer, one each of vehicular mayhem, diabetes and domestic violence. The spare change will be by act of God or suicide – most likely the faith healer. The figure most often and ...”

“... daughter. It’s not clear that his artificial photosynthesis project would do that much more to save the world than a trip to the bottle bank. A lot of the effort being expended, with very little success, on trying to prevent climate change might be better spent preparing to deal with its consequences. Except that no one wants to admit that climate ...”

“... alternatives produce a good deal of excitement on a world scale, a quieter and intellectually more demanding argument has gone on within the tradition concerning the best way to interpret liberalism, both theoretically and in application to concrete social and political problems. One of the most important issues in this debate is how liberalism justifies ...”

“... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...”

“... of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those house sparrows that haunted the privet hedge by the road: surely one of them was a tree sparrow? In my head there was also a list of ‘magic’ birds, birds ...”

“... and protected; his greatest ‘labour’ is the burden of carrying his own fool’s bauble. In Thomas Nashe’s comedy Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), the fool, Will Summers, trips lightly onstage, half-dressed and unburdened by any of the things regular courtiers have to worry about: ‘without money, without garters, without girdle, without a ...”

“... other difficulties to contend with. Besides France, with which the Habsburgs were in a state of more or less constant conflict, Christendom itself was under sustained attack, both from without – the formidable Ottoman armies of another young prince, Sultan Suleiman, who styled himself Sahib-kiran or ‘world conqueror’ – and within, in the form of the ...”

“... He only thought about certain details, while he took no account whatsoever of the other more important aspects … And in short, whereas he had thought to surpass in this work all the paintings in this craft, he scarcely reached the level of his own works executed in times past. Binet reproduces this passage, imagining it appearing in a letter ...”

“... of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But ...”

“... at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray ...”