“... brother, Giuliano, in 1475. An elegantly eclectic poet in both Latin and Italian, Poliziano drew his images of goddesses and nymphs from the Greek and Latin poetic texts he later taught in the Florentine Studio or university. Like Botticelli, he combined his borrowings in new ways. And he described figures in motion – and the fluttering clothing and ...”

“... never been so low – certainly not since the 1640s and 1650s. ‘The House of Commons,’ Sydney Smith said in 1819, ‘is falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation ...”

“... but they can’t put it right. Twenty-one years later, her fictional ex-soldier, Septimus Warren Smith, hears the sparrows sing in Greek, believes that his best friend, killed in the war, speaks to him from behind the trees in Regent’s Park – and prefers death to doctors. Hearing the dreaded Dr Holmes about to burst into the room, Septimus flings himself ...”

“... got their mental picture of it from a 1998 thriller called Enemy of the State. A lawyer (Will Smith), swept up by mistake into the system of total surveillance, suddenly finds his life turned upside down, his family watched and harassed, his livelihood taken from him and the records of his conduct altered and criminalised. He is saved by a retired NSA ...”

“... what about Nelson?). The music halls rang to the words: ‘Nearly everyone knows me, from Smith to Lord Rosebery,/I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.’ His daughter Peggy’s wedding drew crowds almost as big as for the queen’s jubilees. Thousands of spectators wore primroses as a gesture to the family name. The ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... quantities of what they had originally gone there to find: precious metals. ‘Fortune,’ Adam Smith remarked dryly, ‘did upon this what she has done upon very few other occasions. She realised in some measure the extravagant hope of her votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home ...”

“... of their relations to each other. Hockney, in a recent radio conversation with Edward Lucie-Smith, drew attention to the marvellous painting of the mother teaching her child to walk. In the distortions of the mother’s face one sees all the anxiety and love a mother has for her child as he begins, literally, to move ...”

“... was published in 1948, Yvor Winters wrote a notice of it for the Hudson Review. Here Winters drew attention to Berryman’s ‘disinclination to understand and discipline his emotions’, and went on to suggest: ‘Most of his poems appear to deal with a single all-inclusive topic: the desperate chaos, social, religious, philosophical and ...”

“... Voltaire mildly said that the mid-17th century had been an ‘unfortunate’ time for monarchs: he drew attention to the deposition of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim, the destabilising of the Holy Roman Emperor, the flight of the young Louis XIV from Paris in the face of popular revolt, the trial of Charles I and Philip IV of Spain’s loss of Portugal and its ...”

“... should race against a former Kentucky Derby runner stabled in Pirtleville, in Arizona. As the day drew nearer, a foot-and-mouth outbreak made it impossible for either horse to be brought across the border. In those days the border fence at Douglas was not much higher than a sheep fence, and so the race went ahead in the autumn of 1958, with Relámpago running ...”

“... The comradely ‘bullpen’ of inky employees that he later encouraged Marvel readers to imagine drew on his memories of the early years. In reality, Goodman made him replace most of the staff with freelancers at the end of the 1940s, and a complicated distribution debacle led to another cull in 1957. Even then, those laid off rarely held it against Lee ...”

“... the poorest families best? They needed guides to take them around the districts. The first survey drew on the notes kept by School Board visitors who chased up children absent from the new ‘barrack’ state schools, and sometimes had the parents prosecuted (those unable to afford the few pennies for attendance were marked as paupers); later reports relied ...”

“... Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had ...”

“... left its mark on Motherwell’s writings. The editor of this collection suggests that Motherwell drew back from having the pieces collected during his lifetime because he felt the early ones argued the case for abstraction too defensively, and the later ones, risking more by way of self-revelation, were too like surrogates for art itself. What they show is ...”