“... his list of transgressive breachings, include the propulsion in 2005 of a human cannonball, David Smith Sr, from Tijuana, Mexico over the wall and into a safety net in San Diego, California, an open-air circus act that shot him maybe sixty metres. Smith’s stunt was not an immigration offence: he’d obtained permission ...”

“... 1850s. According to the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, when the British Museum assistant George Smith first read the cuneiform in 1872, he ‘jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.The tablet was one of more than thirty thousand that formed the Royal Library ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had ...”

“... Pound, Virgil and Sextus Propertius.’ He also introduced his girlfriend to Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneemann. ‘Her eyes opened wide.’In later years, Acker often said that she had studied linguistics under Roman Jakobson. This wasn’t true, Kraus thinks: Jakobson taught at Harvard, which didn’t take girls until the mid-1970s. Acker ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... pink; Rattleton Traplegh was (only think!) Sadly addicted to flirting with Mrs Saphira Wallabie Smith. The names at least are a minor addition to Anglo-Indian humour: in a Ford Madox Ford novel, one would be a place, the other Head of a beastly Public School for Middle-Class Girls. Kipling was adept at parody. By writing with Tennysonian or Arnoldian ...”

“... country – Churchill most obstinately of all. Guy Burgess was one of those – James Klugmann and John Cornford were the chief – who helped to induct me into the Party. We belonged to the same college, and hence to the same ‘cell’. I remember Burgess as a rather plump, fresh-faced youth, of guileless, almost cherubic expression. I heard him spoken of as ...”

“... of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time. Right up until the 1930s and Forties, characters in the ...”

“... team did not live to see their work in print. Most strange, however, is the virtual absence of Sir John Neale himself, explained (if that is the word) in a prefatory note by the present chairman of the Editorial Board. Criticism must be muted by these solemn signs of human evanescence. Vita brevis, labor longus: is it not almost indecent to question the value ...”

“... blood purges of the 1930s and the political infighting that accompanied his rise to power. Hedrick Smith, in his book The Russians described Medvedev as ‘a carefully calibrated nonconformist’, implying that he trimmed his sails to the wind. The conclusion suggested by a comparison between Let history judge and Khrushchev is rather different. The ...”

“... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...”

“... the reverend submitted insurance claims on his nephew to the Beneficial National, the Vulcan, the John Hancock and the World Wide insurance companies. The reverend, who was black, was assisted in his macabre actuarial pursuits, as well as in his legal battles, by a white lawyer called Tom Radney. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an insurance industry that in ...”

“... He depicts himself aimlessly wandering through town from chip shop to toyshop to W.H. Smith (where he was once falsely accused of shoplifting). Lists can keep you company. The young Meades liked pointing out mistakes in grammar and ‘factual inaccuracies’. He was beginning to cotton on to adults’ ‘dissemblance of their ignorance, their ...”

“... towards maintaining large, sunny open spaces, even in early prehistory. Twenty years ago, Alan Smith and other archaeologists proposed that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers would have found an advantage in enlarging and manipulating grassy areas where wild grazing animals gathered, and in encouraging nuts and berries to grow on the edge of the wood or in ...”