“... so unreliable or delicious as one’s rackety memories of oneself. Some of my recollections may be tainted by time or others’ slanted tellings or photographs, and my memories are no more and no less likely to be precisely accurate than yours or hers. I’m saying only that I was there, or was told first hand, and have remembered things thus and ...”

“... realism; though with both countries still producing permafrosted academic painting. It may now be clear that it was the French who were to make the future of art; but at the time there was lively curiosity and interchange between Paris and London. Charles Deschamps, who sold Henry Hill his pictures, was a patron and friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox ...”

“... off to found a new company, Shockley Semiconductor. And this is where his mother comes into it. May Bradford Shockley, who grew up in back-country Missouri, was the daughter of mining engineers; in 1904 she had become the only female deputy surveyor of minerals in the US. Her affection for Palo Alto – she had gone to university at Stanford – led her to ...”

“... Kuhn wrote, the notions of ‘“scientific progress” and even “scientific objectivity” may come to seem in part redundant.’ We may ‘have to relinquish the notion’ that scientific change brings scientists ‘closer and closer to the truth’. Scientific knowledge did not accumulate: it moved from moments of ...”

“... his earlier book, Before the Armada (1966). He makes no bones about having written it as ‘it may have appeared’ to the English government at the time ‘rather than from some stratospheric international point of view’. Even so, he cannot resist, as most of us cannot resist, some later parallels in this struggle of a small state, comparatively weak in ...”

“... The Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman conviction that we are mere shades in the underworld may seem a bit pessimistic, Casey writes, but at least the ancients didn’t spend all their time fearing hellfire: They did not in general fear an eternity squashed into a stinking sewer of rotten guts, burning in a huge mound of bodies, overcome by an ...”

“... field notes and documents, and his papers weren’t in order. But once he arrived in New York, in May 1941, he was enraptured by the city’s ‘horizontal and vertical disorder’, describing its fabric as ‘riddled with holes’: ‘All you had to do was pick one and slip through it if, like Alice, you wanted to get to the other side of the looking ...”

“... pilot, Lieutenant Van Dyke Fernald, who was shot down at Godega, near Conegliano, in July 1918. He may have accidentally broken formation – often a fatal mistake – but his fellow officers believed he had hung back deliberately at the end of a patrol in order to engage the enemy. His plane was either hit by anti-aircraft fire or attacked in the air – a ...”

“... detachment is not an attitude or stance that Delacroix – however much in theory or manners he may have pretended to it – ever came close to. Proximity and entanglement are his subjects.The loss of the top three feet of Lion Hunt is obviously a sadness. But the fragment we have remains a marvel, and its packed, airless, claustrophobic quality only ...”

“... legality has been respected throughout the Southern Cone, and in that sense Cardoso’s rule may seem nothing special. But substantively, the quality of Brazilian democracy – so the reply goes – has vastly improved during his Presidency. Compared with the chaotic, turbulent years under Sarney, Collor and Itamar, his Government has been a model of ...”

“... shopkeepers, peasants and doctors, whipped into shape in the hills west of Mekele.By the end of May, the tide had begun to turn in Tigray’s favour. Its first major victories over the Ethiopian army took place in June, when the TDF repeatedly routed the Ethiopian army on the road between Agbe and Yechila, capturing large amounts of artillery. This was hard ...”

“... was no longer an option. Projected applicant numbers for Germany alone surged from 400,000 in May to 800,000 in August. Then came an urgent call from the Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann for help in receiving a large number of refugees making their way on foot along the highway from Budapest towards the Hungarian-Austrian border. ‘I sensed,’ Merkel ...”

“... little neither gratitude, nor attentions, love, nor justice, nor anything you may set your heart on. Love interest – adoration, & all that kind of thing is usually a failure – complete … it is really a pity to have any ideals in the first place.’ Florence recalled Emma asking her whether she had noticed that Hardy looked like the ...”

“... of these strange organisms that tips into a sort of messianism, a forlorn hope that fungi may ‘save the world’, or at least live on ‘in capitalist ruins’, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote ten years ago in The Mushroom at the End of the World. They make an appearance in Star Trek: Discovery, crossing space and time and the life-death ...”

“... court. In 1608, at the age of 32, he set out on the European journey which made his name. (It may have been the death of his father in the previous year that made this financially possible.) There was an element of the publicity stunt about it. Will Kemp, the comic, had morris-danced from London to Norwich in 1599 and published a book about it, Kemps Nine ...”