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“... papillomavirus type 18 DNA in HeLa cells (using some nifty gel and a PCR machine). I think this means that Henrietta Lacks had genital warts. I think this means that she slept around. Click. A picture of Henrietta Lacks. A woman looks down at the camera: hands on hips, smiling, as if to say: ‘Is this the way you want ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... frequently); others where what is special is an eerie suburban ordinariness (David Lynch’s small-town America). Doig’s landscapes, to a greater degree than most you might include in an anthology of painted and filmed scenery, suggest a surprising discovery about to be made, rather than something that’s been imposed on an amenable ...”

“... to the underground government facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and ...”

“... fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History. Then there is self-justification after retirement, which almost always produces memoirs of numbing boredom: I assume – or hope – that no one alive has actually read every page of all the volumes ...”

“... at the time of his death in 1400. No earlier manuscripts containing his writings survive. This means that we don’t know how his works circulated in his lifetime, what he wanted them to look like, which of the competing versions he preferred, or even, in any detail, who his first readers were. There are a handful of allusions to Chaucer in literary ...”

“... at least most curious, modulation of all. Almost by definition, it is invisible to (or beyond the means of) those who have not got it. What animal skin is designed to have a meaning for only a few members of the species?‘She’s certainly very simply got up,’ Proust’s Albertine says of Madame Elstir, ‘but she dresses ravishingly, and to arrive at what ...”

“... classes, and where such parties do exist they tend to act less as agents of government than, in David Lehmann’s words, ‘as employment agencies for their followers’. In their place are clientelist, sometimes even semi-feudal, oligarchies whose capacity for survival is remarkable. Despite the revolution of 1910-20, many of the Mexican élites are ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... and reproductive capabilities of the communities that remained behind. Africa was transformed. David Livingstone is prominent among the figures credited with ending the slave trade. In fact, pressure for its abolition was already widespread and achieving results before he was born (in 1813) and it had been banned by the governments of the United States and ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out by vested interests, greed and unexamined ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... strangers at all’ – an accurate observation and an evocative one. But then, because privacy means privation, Fisher has to push it a step further: at the Robie House in Chicago, ‘The observer is mainly aware of an inner life that is self-contained and has no need of observers, visitors, or admirers, an inner life that is rich, mysterious, and ...”

“... the fact they spent most of his tenure in the White House trying to destroy him by fair means or foul, mainly foul. ‘Good ol’ Jesse,’ is all Clinton will say of the poisonous, racist Jesse Helms, who has just called him ‘unfit’ to lead the armed forces and warned him to stay away from North Carolina for his own safety. The newspaper ...”

“... presidency’ of the Vietnam years, all these authors believe the end justified the means. And none has any time for conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor – 9/11, perhaps, has given new plausibility to the cock-up theory of intelligence operations. The major question for 1942 was whether there was any possibility of a cross-Channel attack on ...”