“... mock modesty but a true representation of how he sees himself and chooses to be seen by others – no ordinary chemist, mind you, but the supremo of British chemistry for very many years and a figure of world rank as well. He is a Nobel Laureate and a peer and has been President of the Royal Society and the Head of a Cambridge College; he has earned, too, what ...”

“... Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO’ in cadence as Allen read it. In spite of all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before – we had gone beyond a point of no return – and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. Ginsberg himself was in tears, ‘driving ...”

“... are not pursued with the fervour they once were by the organs of the right: the Telegraph no longer runs a ‘Beebwatch’ column, and though the tabloids lambast the BBC’s attempts at diversity, few have recently campaigned for its privatisation.Such grumblings have been displaced by two interrelated arguments: first, that the licence fee is ...”

“... history or papyrology, but from the words and the verse form of the poems themselves:There is no other poetry in the world as smooth and rapid as this epic poetry, in which the ideas of the particular passage seem fitted so perfectly, and yet so compactly, to the hexameter framework. And this smoothness is due, of course, to the use of a traditional ...”

“... then fled through the backstreets. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured.In no other Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded in such an audacious attack. Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was ordered to execute civilians at the rate of ten for every German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... to be one of the most widely photographed spacecrafts in history,’ Armstrong said. ‘That was no doubt due to the fact it was so photogenic. Its true beauty, however, was that it worked. It was tough, reliable and almost cuddly.’ In front of Aldrin is his shadow, a set of footprints, and part of one of the lunar module’s four footpads wrapped in ...”

“... and urban regeneration, derives in one way or another from the TV programmes, but there are no photographs or screenshots. Some of the pieces look like composites, and there is a lot of repetition. No matter: it’s a joy to read. What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ...”

“... view, not to get something across, but to get it out – a sort of psychic expectoration. This is no accident, since early writers about free religious expression were principally concerned with ensuring that dispatches from the individual conscience could get aired. In the nascent free-speech doctrine, the interactive aspect of communication, other than with ...”

“... first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court his main employment was probably as a secretary. He first appears in Court records in 1500. What can be gleaned of his life before that is ...”

“... the course of the decade. The author turned ten in 1979. Some of what he discovers will come as no surprise to readers who lived through those years as half-awake adults: that, for example, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights and Rock Against Racism were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and ...”

“... dozens of women who found work at the Harvard College Observatory at a time when near enough to no women were employed in astronomy, or any other science, elsewhere. (An excellent book by George Johnson focuses on one of those women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the under-acknowledged astronomer who deduced a way to measure distances in space.) Writing about a ...”

“... titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure. The hall, though large, wasn’t big enough to seat the hundreds of balding, besuited businessmen who showed up; closed-circuit televisions had to be installed in adjacent classrooms. Heller was the era’s most influential proponent of Keynesianism, then the ...”

“... at the top. The king, according to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester’s deathbed confessor, ‘thought no man sincere, nor woman honest, out of principle’, and dealt with his subordinates in that light – dissembling, manipulating, ‘hearing every body against any body’. Personality necessarily became something performed, unstable. Burnet wrote that Charles ...”

“... in church and fuss over the curates.Not all are living off their dwindling savings. No Fond Return of Love opens with a congregation (what would be the collective noun?) of spinsters at a conference for librarians, editorial assistants, indexers and freelance researchers ‘on the dustier fringes of the academic world’. Not everyone is dowdy ...”