“... every day of the first seventy years of his life – the Shard is encased in 11,000 high-tech low-iron glass panels: if we’re into decoding buildings, could this be one for each of the 11,000 military personnel at the US’s largest base in the Middle East, in Qatar, whose oil and gas money supplied most of the half a billion pounds required to build ...”

“... at a once familiar corner. Part of it was gone. The Walgreen’s drug store where, as teenagers, Richard and I had tormented Louie, was gone, replaced by a huge, white, faceless department store, as was the jewellers where I had stood for hours desperately wanting those hideous rings with heavy red and purple stones in them. In almost every other way ...”

“... also increasingly wrote what we might now call environmental history: Portal’s study of the iron and copper-mining and refining industries in the 18th-century Urals, for example, showed how, under particular conditions, industrialisation could lead to a form of ‘feudalism’ where none had existed before. A later, very familiar example is Le Roy ...”

“... and siege-engines (‘Walter Scott and Hollywood had it right’). Cavalrymen were dressed in iron at a time when iron had up to fifty times the value relative to what it has today, a ‘staggering investment’ indeed. The overall story is of a ‘dramatic reversal of the pattern of victimisation’. A West that had ...”

“... be pleased to give dinner to a British officer in captivity. My host, with one eye, one arm, the Iron Cross with oakleaves, talked in a strained voice of the epic experience of war. Were we British, he wanted to know, terrified by the roar of the nebelwerfer? We spoke in French, a German soldier waited on us, and we sat up, drinking brandy by candlelight. It ...”

“... has been tricked into believing Hero is unfaithful, Don Pedro asks: ‘Runs not this speech like iron through your blood?’ Iron has to be hot to melting-point before it ‘runs’, but cold steel can run you through. A sword is in the words, so too is a sudden rush of liquid heat brought about by anger and molten ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton ...”

“... Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as ...”

“... Catholic doctrine, but from the austerity of Jesuit life, ‘the cold-water shaves and the single iron beds’ that Heaney knew at St Columb’s. Hopkins’s ‘whole theology of suffering’, his determined enunciations of self-denial, also echoed Heaney’s ‘mother’s situation … doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but ...”

“... beginning with the Nazi eugenics movement and ending with drunken cameras swinging from one iron door to another in an underground corridor of a Cologne laboratory, to burst finally onto a tray of pathetic gene-manipulated petunia seedlings – all to the accompaniment of eerie Stockhausen-like music. What other branch of learning or culture would allow ...”

“... to others and captured the collateral advantages of growth. The industrial frontier of which Richard Trainor writes, the Black Country, was a more complex affair. He has two noble families, the Earls of Dartmouth and Dudley, together with their respective towns, West Bromwich and Dudley. The Black Country was a supply area for the metal trades as well as ...”

“... for sixpence, ‘in a petty shop at Salisbury, where books, baccon, red-herrings and old iron, were exposed to sale’. Warton thinks that they are sharing the odd discoveries of fellow antiquarians. It is one of his likeable qualities that he does not see that Malone, dedicated to possessing the Bard, is never so whimsical. Another time, Warton is ...”

“... world and back again. Here, at the end, Mount is on the trail of one of the book’s heroes, Richard Jefferies, Victorian polymath, nature writer, campaigner against the exploitation of agricultural labourers, fantasist and (in Mount’s semi-serious conceit) a 19th-century avatar of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. One of Jefferies’s favourite ...”

“... workers as a pillar of sanity, even a larky soul: they never hear the tears hiss on the hot iron. Oddly, she can go into the garden and kill a cockerel without any parade of sensibility, and she has a ruthless way with live plaice and lobsters. More oddly, she can read with entire approval a report (in January 1941) that Hitler has painlessly gassed ...”