“... in issue after issue’ of magazines aimed ‘exclusively at a female readership’. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood imagines sitting in the crook of a tree with a possible future hanging just out of reach on each branch: she can only choose one, and choosing it means losing all the others, so she watches, trapped, as one by one they ripen, fall and ...”

“... Is a history of sexuality possible? It is easy to envisage a history of the language of enticement, the trail of clothes on the floor, the bed even, but the coupling, the thing itself, how could we nail that to the historian’s rack? An instinct timeless in its force, an experience at once private, secret and charmingly individual, how could it be made to submit to dates and social determination? It is easier to admit that the language of love knows its different tropes and turns in time than to admit that, if this is so, the experience it represents must have a history too ...”

“... pays was where things felt familiar, an ‘aural domain’ within earshot of a particular church bell – according to one 18th-century survey, two-thirds of brides came from ‘within shouting distance of the bridegroom’. Your traditional enemies were the ne’er-do-wells in the next village, known by a rude nickname. Robb asserts that such discrimination ...”

“... that it would ‘change the whole conditions of warfare’. Langley’s close friend Alexander Bell agreed, remarking in 1896 that ‘the flying ship will make armies a jest, and our four-million-dollar prize battleship so much worthless junk.’ The militarisation of flight occurred with remarkable speed. In October 1911, an Italian pilot flew on a ...”

“... grievances. Only three years had passed since Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, castigated Martin Luther at Worms for his 95 theses and other foundational texts of the Reformation. Although Luther shrank back to a more conservative position, his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers inspired radical clerics such as Thomas Müntzer to speak out ...”

“... of statues reduced to pigeon roosts. In the middle of a voter registration drive in Atlanta, Martin Luther King Sr allowed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, dressed as house slaves, to sing for a ball celebrating the 1939 première of Gone with the Wind. His ten-year-old son was dressed as a pickaninny. King was criticised by his fellow Baptist ...”

“... abbey. Little of it is left: the remains of two monumental entrance gates plus a lofty detached bell tower, the latter dwarfing the two parish churches that once respectfully flanked an abbey church as large as Worcester or Gloucester Cathedrals. Evesham Abbey, founded when Mercia was a flourishing Anglo-Saxon kingdom, met its end on 30 January 1540, one of ...”

“... the portraits of two paramilitary schemers, antagonists who resemble one another: the devout Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein/IRA and the devout Peter Robinson, a Loyalist leader who has gained in clout since the programme. There will be those who think that the new Robinson is partly due to the fact that, in the programme that was eventually ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... containing the relics of St Theresa of Lisieux. A hundred years ago the Carmelite nun Thérèse Martin died, and she died, according to a woman I spoke to at the end of the queue, ‘with a heart as big as the world itself’. The last words of St Theresa are not open to doubt. ‘I am not dying,’ she said. ‘I am entering into Life.’ She was canonised ...”

“... at home with nationalism, imperialism and even racialism. Scholars from Uday S. Mehta to Duncan Bell have demonstrated that 19th-century liberal prescriptions about freedom and progress, emerging in an age of imperial expansion and capitalist globalisation, presupposed a chasm between civilised whites and uncivilised non-whites. Victorian liberals from Mill ...”

“... on a practice planet to study their effects. When it comes to human welfare, as the economist Martin Weitzman once put it, attempts to anticipate the impact of climate change, especially beyond the short-term, face an ‘immense cascading of huge uncertainties’ of ‘truly stupendous’ scale and scope:There exists here a very long chain of tenuous ...”

“... manifestations of a scholarly cause célèbre. One has only to compare the recent furore over Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man to see how slight the impact of the Blunt affair has been on the academic community. Mutatis mutandis, all three men had disreputable if not dishonourable commerce with totalitarian regimes, all three produced widely influential ...”

“... the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is more or less Brooks’s has been bombed, ‘a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning room … “It ...”

“... to issue a green pamphlet to instruct cyclists in towpath etiquette: ‘Two Tings. Ting your bell twice … pass slowly, be nice!’ And there followed a long list of rules for the peloton to ignore. Rules for bridges, for bends, for wildlife habitats. You might as well hand out copies of the Highway Code on the grid of a Formula One Grand Prix. Ting ...”