“... inaccurate. Credit tends to gravitate to the senior scientists because it is they who sit on the grant and prize committees and they tend to assume the lab chief deserves credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the ...”

“... for 300,000 and now housing a million. I have come back a year later to launch my book here, on a grant from Somerville College, Oxford, which kindly and puzzlingly funds long-gone graduates for such things as a book launch in a country with no bookstores and half the population illiterate. The launch is at Monrovia’s City Hall, one of the few buildings not ...”

“... death. She was 18. Angelica had thought that Clive Bell was her father; in fact it was Duncan Grant, who lived with her mother, but generally slept with men and wasn’t keen on acting as an authority figure. Angelica retreated into an affair with the much older Garnett, who – and this is where it begins to sound like you’re making things up – had ...”

“... to the newspaper offices of Reuters clients. Eight years later, news of the election of President Grant reached London the following day. The assassination of Lincoln was a clear scoop. There were many others, the death of General Gordon among them. One of the most romantic ‘beats’ – a word that has gone out of fashion – was the Relief of ...”

“... purposes. ‘Presents pay for other potential and long-lasting benefits, which the prince can only grant through organised coercion.’ The link between the reproduction of gifts, authority, force and the control of production by the royal house is clear. Hammoudi’s theoretical point is that political economy, however broadly defined, fails to account for a ...”

“... my friends, I mean my close friends. Then he made matters worse by saying he had had a talk with Michael (Heseltine). ‘He is formidable.’ ‘He’, pause, ‘is’, pause, ‘formidable’. I got him back to the station at four thirty, smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David ...”

“... idol she has since become. The reputation of E.M. Forster was in decline. The paintings of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were not privately collected and had been demoted to the cellars of many public galleries. The art criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell was no longer considered significant, and few people knew the name of Carrington. The best-known of the ...”

“... ahead with the purchase of 24 F111s, ended wheat exports to Rhodesia, and took the first moves to grant Aboriginal land rights. By day 13, the duumvirate had covered so much ground already that all they could find to do was to arrange for the swimmer Dawn Fraser to fly to Miami for a dedication ceremony at the US Swimming Hall of Fame. ‘A conservative ...”

“... but they are always faits accomplis. The supposed evidence merely duplicates the premise. If you grant the premise, the evidence fits; if you don’t, there isn’t any evidence. Proust and his housekeeper, Kristeva says, are joined ‘in their devotion to the “good mother”, who would fill them both, alternately, with the sublimated love that binds a ...”

“... he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk ...”

“... Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in ...”

“... and galleries; or the Empire gets reimagined as an indulgence merely of the English. Yet, as Michael Fry argues in this vast, contentious volume, alongside the Reformation, the Treaty of Union and the Enlightenment, Empire was ‘one of the great formative experiences’ in Scotland’s past. The Scottish Empire is a remarkable book that could probably ...”

“... same side as their leader. Rather than acting as a vehicle for Bevan’s views, Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, described itself as leading the campaign against the H-bomb. Lee believed that the Bevanites’ desertion was responsible for the cancer that killed Bevan in 1960: ‘until their attacks began, he never had so much as a stomach ache,’ she wrote ...”

“... Shamir, the Sternist leader who ordered Moyne’s assassination, used the code name ‘Michael’, in homage to Michael Collins). In May 1947, Hecht placed an advertisement in two New York newspapers, apostrophising the Irgun:My brave friends … The Jews of America are with you. You are their champions. You are ...”

“... The Vital Science (1984) shows how Wells, following such precursors as Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen, soon became the champion of a ‘social reformist eugenics’, looking to female emancipation, birth control and the Welfare State to improve the species, and rejecting the policies of the human stud-farm. In his general view of the race ...”