“... between danger and secrets? Between secrets and waste? DeLillo’s novel, like recent novels by John Updike and Philip Roth with more openly ironic and regretful titles (The Lilies of the Field , American Pastoral ), confronts and re-creates American history. The very word ‘history’ keeps flashing through Underworld as if it were an omen or a ...”

“... power relations. Hobbes’s ulterior aim was, of course, to defend a form of absolutism, extending John Selden’s thought that, in a household, only one man’s there to buy the meat. But Hobbes’s views about meaning threaten to prove subversive. Counterfactuals – imagined possibilities – can be used to challenge the status quo. Invert hegemony ...”

“... requested a meeting to decide Seti’s future. Invitees included Carl Sagan and the neuroscientist John Lilly, who believed that dolphins had a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans and had been trying to prove it using experiments that involved feeding the dolphins LSD. The group was so impressed with Lilly’s presentation, which promised a more ...”

“... haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood.’ The smell of Father John Forest being burned in May 1538 makes him recall the (fictional) episode, originally rehearsed in Wolf Hall, in which the ‘what – eight years old?’ (in Wolf Hall ‘nine or so’) Cromwell witnesses the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at ...”

“... for instance, had impeccable credentials. Of good Quaker stock and the daughter of the Radical MP John Bright, she campaigned in her twenties for the Reform Bill and women’s enfranchisement; later she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union and was honorary treasurer of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Affectionate and caring ...”

“... a 1386 copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, or history of the world, now in the library of St John’s, Oxford, the text is followed not only by an index, but also by an account of how to use it: ‘This number, 72, indicates that the heading from the table can be found on the leaf where 72 is written in the top corner.’ Unfortunately, the scribe copied ...”

“... could do all these things, with operations stretching around the globe.In the late 19th century John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil refineries, pipelines, rail transport and storage facilities in the US, but it didn’t control US oilfields, and – to start with – depended on British oil traders to ship its products to Europe. In ...”

“... make possible the creation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, the masterpiece of John Francis Bentley, opened in 1903 and consecrated in 1910.Barry recognises the significance of the cathedral, even though it is consigned to his epilogue. More than 120 coloured stones from at least two dozen countries can be found there, some of them ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... version, above, the camp inmates call the milk ‘you’ throughout. In other translations (by John Felstiner and Michael Hamburger, for example) and in the German text, they start by calling the milk ‘it’ and then move to ‘you’. I like the (incorrect) intimacy from the start, and confess that I had to look at several editions to find out what is ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... transformed in the 1840s by controversial new translations of the Iliad by Lancelot Shadwell and John Gibson Lockhart, and by Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847). Like Arnold, Clough was interested in the way effects of ancient prosody might be reproduced in translation, but since English is a stress-timed language, with no stable concept of syllable ...”

“... creation became the basis for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... construction for more than a decade, and it is only because Young casts his net so wide (taking in John Betjeman’s travel documentaries and the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony among other things) that his choices don’t end up looking a little predictable. For this reason Offbeat is a useful supplement to his book (though it’s much more than that) since the ...”