“... attracted to the alleged possibility of a pre-colonial historiography of tropical Africa rather more than forty years ago, when thinking about a book entitled On the Trail of the Bushongo, the latter not being a rare quadruped, as I had at first thought when opening the book, but an equatorial tribe or people of whom I had not previously heard tell. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... were heartily glad to be rid of her, she fouling our house mightily.’ Captain Cook had more success when the Resolution arrived in Woolwich in 1775, carrying birds and animals purchased by Johann Reinhold Forster, the expedition’s naturalist, in South Africa, and intended for the queen. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting on the ...”

“... is, with his father, the hero of his story, it is Bevins, Vollman and a preacher called Everly Thomas who deliver most of the lines. Joining these three are a throng of shades – each ‘wronged Neglected Overlooked Misunderstood’, as Willie puts it – who are eager to retail their own stories of woe. This is a ghost story, in other words, narrated by ...”

“... Fliess family and discovered by Peter Swales among the Fliess papers in Jerusalem. We learn much more about Freud’s relationship to Fliess, especially about his extraordinary devotion to Fliess’s odd – if not crackpot – views. Masson, however, does not make any suggestions as to the basis for this attraction. The edition still contains only half the ...”

“... the character of a deliberate debate’: what was at stake, according to Barrell, was ‘more the ownership of the word’. Put most simply, the charges and counter-charges boiled down to the question of who was guilty of imagining treason, who actually imagined the King’s death. The first part of the book talks about the terms available for such ...”

“... and Giorgione (1877), as well as the notorious conclusion to The Renaissance (1873), but those more familiar texts make up well under a third of a volume that moves from archaic sculpture and pre-Socratic philosophy to Pascal, Rossetti and Mérimée, and includes some distinctly obscure pieces, such as an essay on ...”

“... fired as fourth cook on a Boston-to-Washington dining car, and had yet to learn to want anything more than a good time. On any morning that summer, Little might have brushed shoulders with the slender, watchful Ralph Ellison, passing through the Harlem YMCA, where Little roomed for a time only a block away from Small’s. Ellison was preparing himself to ...”

“... Leoneans subscribe to a cellphone service; even Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, has more than twice that number. This is not a developing country: it is, in the polite lexicon of international aid workers, a ‘reconstructing’ one. Yet this had once been a utopia of sorts. The origins of Freetown date back to the 1780s in Britain, where a ...”

“... and has little to do with oratory. There are plenty of competent barristers, but Kentridge was more than this: he was from the start one of those advocates who sense exactly where to pitch anything from a lethal monosyllabic comment to a day-long submission of law. Of the many, often hyperbolic, appreciations of Kentridge’s style cited by ...”

“... Marten could subvert protest at radical measures in the Commons by laughter, and friends like Thomas Chaloner and Thomas May shared his sceptical wit. To denounce them as libertines was to become a stock tactic for conservatives anxious to show where republicanism ended up; Aubrey himself disliked this tactic, and felt ...”

“... a run of dedications by the same hand. Agatha Christie is an interesting writer and an even more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic ...”

“... have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be self-generating: Razorfish, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo! There was a strange connection during that boom between whimsy ...”

“... bellowed. Echoing this, the French incendiary Louis Aragon remarked that he could think of nothing more beautiful than a church and some dynamite. The immediate enemy was of course the beefy bourgeois, defender of property and social order, with his fixed ideas about beauty, truth and respectability. Voltaire had wished to crush this tedious specimen; Gautier ...”