“... novel, Shuttlecock, narratives of two generations are again developed in tandem – but with a more exhibitionistic cleverness; and again the failure, or, at best, distortion, of communication between fathers and children is witness to the compromise of ideals – often an ideal of nature – which should have transmitted themselves in a sense of the ...”

“... The sun never shone more brightly and a boy’s dreams never seemed in closer reach, nor the girl next door prettier, nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it ...”

“... In September​ , the Irish government held a state funeral for the exhumed remains of Thomas Kent, a rebel and a patriot who was executed in 1916 and buried in the yard of what is now Cork Prison, at the rear of Collins Barracks, once the Victoria Barracks. His coffin was first removed to the garrison church, where thousands of people – including Dr John Buckley, the bishop of Cork and Ross – filed past to pay their respects ...”

“... laser pointers, broken or otherwise. The visitors started to arrive, and by the end of the year more than ten thousand bids had been placed on AuctionWeb. In February 1996, the site was receiving so much traffic that Omidyar’s internet service provider started charging him a commercial rate of $250 a month (up from $30 for a home user). With the ISP ...”

“... see that he wins her love and is a faithful husband to it; he courts her as fervently as, and much more persistently than, he does any other woman – he amuses her, shocks her, tells her the truth, expresses contempt for the boring and brutish flatterers in her second-rate world who would deceive her for their private purposes, and with good spirits survives ...”

“... his better judgment to downgrade his hero in the title and to include the Shelleys, who are more famous. This rich, glorious book is, however, a biography of William Godwin – no more, no less. St Clair himself is described on the dust-jacket as a ‘senior Treasury official’, a horrifying disclosure which emerges ...”

“... in effect Yeltsin’s serf. When he was cast out by the man whom he had served day and night for more than ten years, Korzhakov ‘suddenly realised’, he now writes, that he had never loved Yeltsin as a man. At first I simply worked with him. He stood out from the other nomenklatura officials and this difference delighted me. Then during his period of ...”

“... work on the scale of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is bound also to be seen as much more than a reference tool: as, by turns, a statement of national identity, an occasion for communal pride, a showcase for contemporary historical scholarship, a piece of swagger publishing, and, less directly, a stay against oblivion, a giant memorial slab ...”

“... the famous Somerset Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the United States followed suit in 1808. Slavery in the British West Indies was abolished in 1834, and even the tenacious ...”

“... language of a land such as God gave Cain – or Mina Minahan, to select one of the characters that Thomas Keneally pulls in from Australia’s badlands and sets amid the colourful photographs of Mark Lang and Gary Hansen. Sheep and Man, offering history to the scientist and biology to the historian, fits into no particular discipline. It rejects demarcation in ...”

“... appearance of the risen Lord to a company of apostles; but John alone has the story of doubting Thomas, surely a strong apologetic fiction designed to demonstrate that the entire body, wounds and all, has been resurrected. At some point, either in the evening of Easter Sunday or forty days later, having forewarned the apostles of the visitations that are to ...”

“... of computer analogies and advances in molecular biology we are on the verge of a breakthrough. The more we learn about the brain the clearer it is how little we understand its embodiment of the mind. Here is a typical passage from Philosophy and the Brain by the eminent neurophysiologist J.Z. Young: The pressure waves falling upon the ear from the sound of ...”

“... the time Parry sailed for the US the following autumn, he had hundreds of hours of recordings on more than 3500 aluminium discs, as well as eight hundred notebooks of transcribed songs – raw materials for a lifetime of research. But three months after returning to America he was dead from a gunshot wound in a Los Angeles hotel room.Milman Parry was born in ...”

“... or palazzi. Documenta, the other prestigious international exhibition in Europe, tends to be more curator-driven; also, it takes place only every five years, and its setting, Kassel in Germany, isn’t a World Heritage Site.For the first time in its 110 years, the Biennale (on view until 6 November) is directed by two women, both Spanish. María de ...”

“... my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more.’ Even then Sansom thought the book might flop, so he began another, set in 1930s Spain. As it turned out, Dissolution (2003) was a bestseller and a sequel was commissioned. He completed his Spanish Civil War novel, Winter in Madrid (2006), anyway. Since ...”