“... First World War. Freeman characterises it as ‘the great adventure’ of his life but the reader may disagree, having been so entertainingly and expertly led through the many other adventures that occupy the first two-thirds of the book. Perhaps Ede’s was not thought to be enough of a name to warrant the full biographical treatment without the more famous ...”

“... years after his death,’ Bidder writes, ‘inconsistencies in Magnitsky’s story suggest he may not have been the hero many people – and Western governments – believed him to be.’ Bidder casts doubt on Browder’s claim that Magnitsky was targeted after voluntarily approaching Russia’s investigative committee in 2008 with a witness statement ...”

“... Todd and King speculate that the choice of subjects – religious men and courtly women – may have been dictated by the shared technical blueprint of the automata: each machine needs some sort of curtain, robe or dress to hide its internal mechanism and create the illusion.The mechanical monk does resemble Diego de Alcalá (or popular representations ...”

“... administered the pledge to some penitents who were actually ‘in a state of intoxication’ and may well have been, as Samuel suggests, experiencing the fleeting regret of the very drunk rather than a lasting desire for reform. In Birmingham in 1863, a priest implored his flock to put in requests for sick calls before 10 a.m., ‘except in very urgent cases ...”

“... the final days of the war he had come to suspect that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in ...”

“... the mannerisms that characterise ‘mezzo-Hemingways’ and Woolf’s ‘weaker sisters’, while May Sinclair is chastised for turning out books ‘with one hand tied behind her and a buttered crumpet in the other’. The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about duplication, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She confessed herself ‘a ...”

“... beasts that are not clean’ (according to Genesis 7:1-3). Scientists today estimate that there may be as many as 8.7 million extant animal species. In AiG’s ‘worst-case scenario’, however, ‘Noah was responsible for fewer than 6744 individual animals.’ AiG argues that the Hebrew word min (‘sort’ or ‘kind’) does not correspond to the modern ...”

“... all other Kings, have ever been subject unto them, not only ever since my birth, but even as I may justly say, before my birth, and while I was yet in my Mother’s belly.’ It is no wonder that this clever boy grew up to be watchful, or that he thanked God for his miraculous deliverances and chose to shore up monarchy, or that he learned to dissemble and ...”

“... year North Korea tested its first nuclear device. Sanctions did little to prevent this; they may have had the opposite effect. But by exploiting foreign dependence on the dollar, the US government had shown that it too had a powerful new weapon. Economic blockades are not new. The Peloponnesian War was triggered by one in the fifth century BCE; the ...”

“... to the world and if what you give to the world is, say, some or a lot of poetry then a) it may not be any good and b) the world doesn’t want it anyway. Is that enough for you to go around putting on airs? Aren’t there other things you could give to the world? I think Arnold felt that powerfully because the world needed a lot of what he could do for ...”

“... letters. The postman always announced his presence with a ‘burst of prophetic whistling’. In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed ...”

“... life,’ she said in her sentencing, ‘because you are not a protector, you are a killer.’ In May 2013 she sentenced a serial rapist to 252 years – 15 years on each of 11 counts of robbery, 12 years for attempted murder and life sentences for each of three rape charges. Judge Masipa knows about violence. She was born in Soweto, in a family of ten ...”

“... profile. In Scotland, 24 areas are examined; in England it’s 17. ‘Two individuals may match in one or more area,’ she said, ‘but the chances of them matching in all areas is about one in ten to the power of 23 or 24, though the statistic used in court is one in a billion.’At the time Nikki was murdered, a large amount of biological ...”

“... London-New York and Paris-New York are possible; Frankfurt-New York is not.Yet, perverse though it may seem to say so, Concorde works at all because, in one limited sense, the designers were modest. They successfully confined themselves to solving only the next problem, filling in the immediately adjacent bits of the unknown. Take Concorde’s chosen cruising ...”

“... to medicals, and from there to military training and despatch to the front. As much as they may admire the courage of their army, the men of Kharkiv fear, and in many cases actively avoid, having to serve in it.After the 11 p.m. curfew on my first night in the city, when I was thinking about going to bed, ignoring, as people tend to do, the air raid ...”