“... to issue a green pamphlet to instruct cyclists in towpath etiquette: ‘Two Tings. Ting your bell twice … pass slowly, be nice!’ And there followed a long list of rules for the peloton to ignore. Rules for bridges, for bends, for wildlife habitats. You might as well hand out copies of the Highway Code on the grid of a Formula One Grand Prix. Ting ...”

“... adhere to formulated myth, traditionally developed from such meetings.’ Bloom’s authority was Martin Buber’s distinction, in I and Thou, between the two primary words, I-Thou and I-It: When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through ...”

“... that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’ It’s usually easy to tell, in even the briefest conversation about Aristide, how your interlocutor feels about him. Opinion in Haiti is ...”

“... Joseph P. Kennedy. Jacobs paraphrases the Rat Pack’s foreign minister without portfolio, Dean Martin: ‘Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.’As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s ...”

“... On 16 March 1810​ a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides ...”

“... of passage known as ‘domestic science’, before the whole enterprise was handed over to Taco Bell. Brought into the light of day, they proved an invaluable resource. But, if we try to recount the history of ‘King’, as Martin Luther King Jr High in the mid-1990s was called, it is a story not so much of surprising ...”

“... Jean Calvin asked, lambasting the pair for filling the Gospel with ‘wicked additions’. Martin Luther thought that the papists hoped to conceal knowledge about Muhammad because they knew how similar his Alcoran was to their own adulterated brand of Christianity. He pushed for a printed edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it ...”

“... denounced him and his supporters as far-right zealots. Social scientists, among them Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, saw the Goldwaterites as the embodiment of a pathological ‘authoritarian personality’, wholly out of touch with the liberalism they believed was central to the American public. ‘When, in ...”

“... whose offspring will represent the future unity of a now divided nation. Agatha (‘Gatty’) Bell in the first story, Sally Niven in the second, are Lowland women who marry Highland men, though in circumstances which involve the rejection, with fatal consequences, of a third lover, a rejection which risks the success of the union, both marital and ...”

“... as Steve Jobs’s last word being ‘Wow!’ At the funeral Obama delivered a speech, Chris Martin of Coldplay sang ‘Til Kingdom Come’, and Beau and Hunter’s sister, Ashley, quoted from Beau’s ‘theme song’, the New Radicals’ ‘You Get What You Give.’ Hunter delivered his own eulogy: I retold the story about Beau holding my hand when ...”

“... for determining specific gravities; all manner of timekeepers; a universal joint; a diving bell; a bullet-proof vest; a ‘sailing chariot’; a velocipede; improvements to the camera obscura, oil lamps and musical instruments, and in techniques for staining marble, printing maps and milling apples; and a formal method for producing an endless supply ...”

“... novel, Wild Oats (1979), included a number of sentences taken straight from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. These plagiarists, he found, nearly always used the notebook defence: they’d copied out passages by authors they admired into their notebooks, but forgot to add quotation marks and attributions; this material then somehow got mixed up with their ...”

“... dominance of the ‘primes’ – the five major aerospace and electronics contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics – which he characterises as lumbering giants holding back the US military’s technological capabilities.This complaint is also central to Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff’s Unit X. Shah is a ...”

“... key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won ...”

“... At Cam Ranh Bay naval base, black servicemen revolted when white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag. The US military leadership fumblingly tried to accommodate the growing number of Black Power activists in Vietnam – military bureaucrats started investigating commanders who did not allow black troops to wear ...”