“... knew a thing or two about lachrymose tat, dismissed Wilson’s book as a ‘syrupy dish for young sentimentalists’. Wilson had the review suppressed and a puff inserted in its place. What is most remarkable about Wilson’s literary output is that he produced his vast and varied body of work while holding down the most prestigious humanities ...”

“... insect replicating its structure, almost exactly, to produce a collection of tiny, near-identical young. Indeed, this is the marvel of nature, the characteristic that has, hitherto, been used to divide animate from inanimate forms. Modern biological thought has focused on four principal questions. What is the nature of the mechanism that enables the ...”

“... their importance, their originality and their elegance. Rabies has Louis Pasteur, smallpox has Edward Jenner. Who has heard of Peter Panum? Even the book about the institution where he spent most of his career, S.E. Stybe’s Copenhagen University: Five Hundred Years of Science and Scholarship (1979), while acknowledging his importance as a founder of ...”

“... Halliwell fell in love with and married the baronet’s daughter. Thereafter Phillipps hated the young man implacably, and did all he could to damage him and his wife. Halliwell nevertheless went on with his work, much of which was of biographical importance. When Phillipps died in 1872, his son-in-law, to comply with the terms of the baronet’s ...”

“... records in 1898, ‘Went for a short ride up Maddingley road. Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees,’ the flash of hindsight tells us that this is the origin of a key episode in The Longest Journey; but in the moment of its happening whatever thoughts or feelings it stirred in him remain hidden. In the more revealing notebook diaries Forster ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac ...”

“... a more or less steady influx of government cash. Within days of Sputnik’s launch in 1957, two young engineers at Johns Hopkins University were using the Russian satellite’s radio signal to plot and then predict its position. GPS came of age in the 1991 Gulf War. The US air force bought the first GPS-enabled missiles in 1988; new satellites were launched ...”

“... teaching officers were without a college fellowship. So the former secretary of the Cabinet, Edward Bridges, was invited to examine what could be done. True to form, the colleges turned down his main, and the university his secondary, recommendation. Commensality means a lot to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five ...”

“... municipal scallywags like Derek Hatton. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are all very well for the young, but the real pleasure of middle age is schadenfreude. Sometimes, when one looks back at the long line of Thatcher’s villains, one has to concede that, however much one disliked Thatcher’s triumphalism at the time, one could hardly wish the battle to ...”

“... and there were those, when the Knox book appeared, who questioned its accuracy. An impertinent young priest called Warlock wrote to him: ‘Alas, I think that I am but one of many who feel that inaccuracies and the general tone of certain sections of your book have given its readers a wrong impression of Monsignor Knox as a priest, of his bishops and of ...”

“... seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank was quite a close friend of Forster’s, and undoubtedly called him ‘Morgan’; his book of course benefits greatly from his personal knowledge, but he was quite right to regard the familiarity implied by regular use of the first name as out ...”

“... her recently remarried father die, and to confront Wanda Fay, his obnoxious wife. Toward this young woman (a ‘ball of fluff’, as Helen McNeil calls her in a fine introduction to the novel, but hard as nails) Eudora Welty shows an unexpected hatred. The ‘scored and grimy’ breadboard Laurel rescues as she prepares to leave the ...”

“... was G.M. Trevelyan’s textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him ...”

“... doesn’t discuss the Gaddafis themselves, but he does paint a picture of the world in which the young Gaddafi, until very recently, felt right at home. This is the world of ‘offshore’. Shaxson doesn’t limit the term to its technical meaning, as a simple description of the particular jurisdictions that enable people to eliminate their tax bills. He ...”

“... bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also concise: ‘personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ...”