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“... the preparatory design for the Eiffel Tower is as stark as a modern electricity pylon, and it took on its final ornamental character only after Sauvestre’s lacy embellishments had been added. In the 20th century, architects, enthralled by what engineers could do, began to borrow from them. Before, architects had been left with the job of making extreme ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... gave them two fingers and a string of obscenities. They laughed, much amused. But Gokhale quickly took his arm and said to ignore them. ‘I know them,’ he said worriedly. ‘They are corrupt. They are friendly with the police.’ He pointed to a hotel, a dingy-looking facade nearby. ‘You see that place there? If ever you went to get a room there ...”

“... out’ for generations: the deaths of heirs, a fondness for cards and catastrophic marriages all took their toll. But after 1918, with the loss of so many men and the accumulation of death duties, it seemed that the end really was nigh. Hundreds of country houses were put up for sale that year. Less expectedly they sold in unprecedented numbers and for ...”

“... to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct ...”

“... The Iraq Inquiry​ , chaired by Sir John Chilcot and composed of five privy councillors, finally published its report on the morning of 6 July, seven years and 21 days after it was established by Gordon Brown with a remit to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons ...”

“... everybody else was doing, so that there was too much traffic for the line to handle. And then, it took only one call to end it. There was a spate of e-mail, too, a lot of it from strangers offering guidelines on new ways to park, new methods of walking across a carpark. One unsigned set of instructions began: ‘As you already know I have been a Swat Sniper ...”

“... starting points. Names, too, are less fragile than buildings. There is evidence that some changes took place very quickly. The speed of rebuilding after the Great Fire was phenomenal. The spread of London westwards in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was also brisk. Some transformations teetered on the brink before falling back. ...”

“... transferred to Broadmoor, the prison for the criminally insane.) Dennis Nilsen’s trial, which took place in 1983 for crimes committed between 1978 and 1983, saw a similar, equally unedifying clash of discourses – part of the problem being that the law makes a set of assumptions about free will and volitional action which wholly pre-empt the psychiatric ...”

“... hundred years earlier Defoe had not miscalculated his method but miscalculated his audience: they took him literally, and seriously. Pushkin found the same, putting it down to the ignorance and sentimentalism of the Russian reading public; and when Lermontov in 1840 brought out A Hero of Our Time it was received with the same literalness, and read according ...”

“... in a mechanical sense; Vico reappropriated it for metaphysics. Vico’s project, however, really took off when he confronted the challenge of modern scepticism, specifically the political scepticism of Machiavelli, Hobbes (above all), Spinoza, Locke and Bayle. On Lilla’s account, Descartes served as the foil for Vico’s fundamental metaphysical ...”

“... centuries, after which colonising the entire galaxy would be very much on the cards. Also that I took seriously Dyson’s vision of an infinitely prolonged future for our descendants. Even in something as concise as Imagined Worlds, a work of some two hundred pages with very few words per page, it is startling to find Dyson doing so little to explain this ...”

“... in a sandstorm, croaking out: ‘Follow the money.’ Bernstein and Woodward’s subsequent story took months to run its course, requiring as it did double-sourcing, deep analysis, painstaking consultation with lawyers as to publishability, judicious interplay between ‘reporting’ and ‘editorialising’. What has made the change, of course, is the ...”

“... The myth that Mars presented the distant spectacle of a dead or dying mighty civilisation took firm root with the popularising theories of Percival Lowell, at the turn of the century. It was bad astronomy, but excellent inspiration for romancers. Among Martian fantasies inspired by the ‘canals’, the most famous is Wells’s War of the Worlds ...”