“... In 1828 Macaulay identified the press as ‘a Fourth Estate of the Realm’; by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know ...”

“... the throats of any domestic animals. That left human blood. Fleeing from the Liverpool slaver Thomas, which had been taken over by her mutinous cargo, crewmen in their escape boat eventually ‘fell into the dreadful expedient of eating each other’. Lots were cast to determine the first victim and fortunately the surgeon accompanying the party had ...”

“... to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past will find it here. On the other hand, anyone who has wondered whether the history of the United States can ...”

“... appearance) to the Canary Islands, where (Spanish) bananas are still grown. A Spanish monk, one Thomas de Berlanga, may have been responsible for the fruit’s subsequent journey to the Americas, for he planted it in San Domingo in 1516; the English, those comparative latecomers to the New World, saw its wonderful obliging nature, and took many banana ...”

“... cohesion, Ferguson was no exception. He expressed confidence in his London-based publisher William Strahan, whose ear was ‘accustomed to a better dialect than my own’. Even the Ossian controversy, which embroiled Ferguson in argument with Thomas Percy, only highlights his lack of any serious nationalist ...”

“... The member yielded not seed but, at the Circumcision, blood. The Circumcision was described by St Thomas Aquinas as ‘a remedy for original sin, which is transmitted through the act of generation’. God further condescended when consenting to enact this sacramental admission of guilt, though of course free of it himself. Steinberg again and again ...”

“... with various combinations of energy, luck, ambition, ingenuity and persistence. The arch tinkerer, Thomas Alva Edison, built himself an X-ray machine within four days of learning of Roentgen’s discovery; he made a better tube, found the best material for making screens which fluoresced when struck by X-rays (it made the non-photographic use of X-rays ...”

“... species had to be ordered into a book. Ritvo makes much of writers like Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Bewick and William Frederick Martyn to advance her claim that there was resistance to the ‘hegemonic juggernaut’ of Linnaean classification. But in telling this tale of brave outsider plurality v. the chilly ...”

“... though for different reasons. His intricate manoeuvres to secure the Presidency after Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s resignation in 1935 inevitably won him many enemies. As foreign minister from 1918, his unwillingness to continue to let Czechoslovaks participate in the intervention against Soviet Russia had infuriated conservatives such as Karel ...”

“... no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the botanist William Withering, another Lunar man, it was ‘one of the best private philosophical clubs in the kingdom’, broken up, so it was said, when Tory reaction in the wake of the French Revolution brought politics too near to its otherwise tranquil ...”

“... appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield accepted the submission of Gordon’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine, that guilt demanded treasonous intent, but it’s doubtful whether a jury of London property-owners would have worried about such questions. They were not going to convict an Englishman who had set out to defend Protestantism.A number of statutes ...”

“... bow tie and stingy-brimmed fedora, he seemed freakishly straight – an American type not unlike William Burroughs or David Lynch. The film featured interviews with his older brother, Charles (who had killed himself by the time it was released), and his younger brother, Maxon. It also included Robert Hughes’s pronouncement that Crumb was a latter-day ...”

“... this in a novel way. The most recent stage in Gaia’s evolution, he says, began in 1712, when Thomas Newcomen succeeded in building the first practical steam engine for pumping water. Newcomen’s engine ran on coal, and his invention set in motion an ongoing chemical interaction. Many early steam engines, including Newcomen’s, were used to control ...”

“... and charisma with a gift for big tech, electro-prophecy and bullshit. He was a near perfect Thomas Pynchon character, and his cameo appearance in Pynchon’s Against the Day in 2006 confirmed his status as a counter-cultural hero. Pynchon’s Tesla is a fleeting and mysterious presence, a man around whom other characters weave tall tales. Towards the ...”

“... a chance of active cultural participation, operating across time as well as across space. When William Cowper (who was related to two poets in this volume) contrasts the wicked Voltaire (publishing and public) with the virtuous country dame, ‘she never heard of half a mile from home’, he really wishes that women and the virtuous poor remain icons of ...”