“... DVD of the firework night, it was still selling. Nobody remembered what happened after that. One young woman, a highly qualified lawyer, now working off-the-book for around €400 a month, recalled the only Olympic event she’d actually witnessed. ‘There were horses dancing. Very pretty.’ The story of the drug-cheat sprinters and their staged motorcycle ...”

“... deep commonalty (or maybe a depressed commonalty) surviving below the Hanoverian consensus (Blake, Stephen Duck, the poet-labourer, who drowned himself in a fit of despondency). In a way, Lucas is most interesting about the poets in between these groups, the traitors or defeatists like Wordsworth or Tennyson. Both men, after all, had strong dialect interests ...”

“... and Bakalar’s evidence comes from impeccable professional sources. The Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, is a rare survivor from a generally lethal form of cancer. Chemotherapy induced in him ‘long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea’ which only smoking joints alleviated. Gould notes that he had never personally approved of ...”

“... often unpredictable, as many traders discovered to their cost. When the American captain Gideon Young shipped two tonnes of the medicinal sea plants known as ‘squills’ to Brown & Ives in Rhode Island, the merchants could not sell them. Having paid the burdensome tariff levied on all such imports, Brown & Ives re-exported the plants that hadn’t already ...”

“... on the undergraduate-and-general-reader market tapped with such undeserved commercial success by Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.2 As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt’s effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd’s generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography,3 into a cocked jester’s cap. The ploy of ...”

“... experience, rendered possible by teamwork on the part of Science, Art and Labour. According to Stephen Haliday’s The Great Stink of London, published earlier this year, 827,000 persons used the water closets installed for the Great Exhibition, ‘many visitors no doubt experiencing the device for the first time’. How and why the authorities counted ...”

“... narrative. Drawing on elements as disparate as Alexander Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales and Stephen Hecht’s scholarly paper ‘Tobacco Carcinogens, Their Biomarkers and Tobacco-Induced Cancer’, Red Plenty is a seamless pastiche. It takes the long view of Soviet history, although Spufford’s view is highly selective. Sputniks and cosmonauts go ...”

“... narrated by the corpse. ‘A Visit from Jesus’ is a moving fable, only six pages long, about a young woman who starts dating an older man. Deeply devout, she is visited in her prayers by Jesus (‘She floated up to heaven and he was there, seated in an armchair’), who warns her that her lover is a consumer of paedophiliac porn. She stabs him to ...”

“... at the ongoing sanctions, the blockade was destroying the underpinnings of Iraqi society as young people lost hope and sought relief through emigration or immersion in religious fundamentalism.The sanctions were always publicly justified as a means to get Saddam to relinquish any and all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In fact, he had ...”

“... was not at all hand some, but I see that he might have been attractive to his wife when he was a young man. It would have been an attractiveness that is different from that of the young men of my generation; one has only to see old Bengali films to realise that men were slighter and smaller in those days, but with a ...”

“... is meant as a joke. 15 January. Go into the chemist in Camden High Street to find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorising the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying: ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole shop’s mine. It’s bought ...”

“... are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take the form of free-wheeling meditations on Wellsian topoi – ‘Possibilities of Space and Time’, ‘The Fall of Empires’, ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia’. In Part Two of Shadows of the Future, he branches out into ...”

“... neoliberal leadership that had ruled the country for the last three decades. What appealed to the young and to the many who had left the party in disgust during the Blair/Brown years – what appealed to the people who turned the campaign into a genuine social movement – was precisely what alienated the political and media cliques. Corbyn’s campaign ...”

“... as ‘the book’.) Like most of Blume’s protagonists, 11-year-old Margaret is an engaging young person who wonders if she’s normal: she’s just moved to a new town in the suburbs, her parents are agnostics from different religious backgrounds, and when, oh when will she get her period? Margaret joins a small band of girls at school called the ...”

“... A great Irish lady, her disgraced nephew and a young priest with strong Republican sympathies are driving through Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1916. ‘They were speaking of patriots, Dublin associations of famous rebels, ancient and modern.’ Merrion Square evokes the memory of a distinguished Irishman whom the English put on trial ...”