“... called Holofernes; but instead of the decapitation his name appears to promise, he suffers nothing more traumatic than having his amateur pageant jeered by its aristocratic audience. The play is characterised not by courtly intrigue but by courtly love: DUMAINE: ‘Do not call it sin in me That I am forsworn for thee, Thou for whom great Jove would swear Juno ...”

“... III and his queen consort, Charlotte, did in 1761. Underneath her robes, Charlotte wore something more singular: her stomacher – the triangular panel covering the opening of the bodice – was encrusted with diamonds and valued at £60,000, the equivalent of more than £9.8 million today. At least it was recycled ...”

“... always the same ground, appeared from big publishers within a month of each other. Each contains more than a hundred and twenty poets, and both, while aware of picking from a changing landscape, expect (for a time at least) to be definitive. Their editors are themselves well-known poets who leave their own work out. Luckily, and as if to exemplify the way ...”

“... inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went further: ‘The state of Africa, as I have described it, is exactly such as we should expect in a country where the capture of men was considered as a more advantageous employment than agriculture or ...”

“... Similarly, we would not call ‘literary’ a piece of writing which was not somehow portable, more capable than a shout of ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre of being transported from one context to another and interpreted differently each time. In this sense, literary discourse is what it is by virtue of never being quite identical with itself. But the ...”

“... But things have changed dramatically since then, and since the – in retrospect – even more innocent time of the publication of White Teeth (2000). Looking back on her earlier novels in a speech she gave in Berlin in 2016, included here under the title ‘On Optimism and Despair’, Smith notes that people often ask her whether she has lost her ...”

“... military waste-paper basket of 100 AD. The originals can be seen at the British Museum. Bowman and Thomas provide the first and the final publication. Their book does more than decipher the faded and broken scrawl (difficult enough in itself): it provides, with enviable erudition, the whole necessary ...”

“... was like nothing that had gone before it. The wings of the Tupolev-designed plane had a span of more than sixty metres, the same as a Boeing 747’s. It was driven by eight massive engines, generating between them 7000 horsepower. Its 11 cabins, connected by telephone lines and pneumatic tubes, housed a cinema, a photographic studio and a printing press, to ...”

“... book collectors. Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money). The book’s value was due not only to its extreme scarcity but to its central role in that most celebrated of literary love ...”

“... Thomas Edison invented himself, and then he invented the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite ...”

“... we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted ...”

“... him personally it aroused feelings of alienation, the sense of being an exile in his own land. For Thomas Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, the refugee camp atrocities produced ‘something of a personal crisis’ and tore away ‘every illusion’ he had ‘ever held about the Jewish state’. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that ...”

“... perhaps, boiling an egg at the time. I’m inclined towards teeth-gnashing, but aspire to being a more balanced person, so I alternated reading the Denis Thatcher story with a rereading of Moby-Dick. A dozen pages of Denis (‘He was happy in his own skin and had played with a straight bat since the day he was born’) over a cup of tea, and then back to ...”

“... Indeed, if its canon is capacious enough to include Burns, Scott, Yeats, Joyce and Dylan Thomas, why did it never come to be known as ‘British literature’, a description that now sounds oddly stilted? A few 19th-century literary historians – Scots for the most part – happily used that phrase, but since then scruples about terminology have ...”

“... nine people ‘that we know about’, and having crippled two others, one of whom (of whom more later) was permanently attached to a respirator in Baltimore. Dr Lecter was being visited by Will Graham, a Special Investigator attached to the FBI, in pursuit of a man who had murdered two families. When Graham arrives at Lecter’s cell, the good doctor ...”