“... the Atlantic, Franklin did in fact father an illegitimate child by an unknown mother. This child, William, was also to father an illegitimate son, Temple Franklin, who did the same thing when he was supposedly under the moral protection of his grandfather in Paris twenty years later. No strait laces about the Franklins, though the biographers seem a little ...”

“... other three – in 1962, 1966 and 1972 – were based on plans by the prominent architect-planner William Holford. The 1962 plan put Eros on a pedestrian plaza surrounded by office blocks; the one from 1966 included a raised-level piazza with traffic running underneath. One response to the 1962 proposal called it an ‘atrocity’ that would ‘entirely wipe ...”

“... were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat.’ From his first novel, The Hunters of 1957, a description of fuel tanks jettisoned by ...”

“... symbolically locked the doors of the Jacobin Club. ‘This woman could close the gates of Hell,’ William Pitt said. She was still only twenty.The mood after the Terror was hectic, a combination of relief and post-traumatic shock. All three women were in difficulties. Térézia was famous but broke. Her husband had made off with most of her dowry and Tallien ...”

“... She recounts how sperm donation was invented in 1884 by the prominent Philadelphia physician William Pancoast, who inseminated a chloroformed and totally unsuspecting patient with the semen of his ‘best-looking’ medical student, and only later informed her husband – who agreed that his now happily pregnant wife should remain ignorant rather than ...”

“... of draught animals nor of the wheel. The Anasazi also produced beautiful pottery decorated with white and black geometric designs, built sophisticated irrigation systems and erected astronomical and solar observatories. Man Corn, however, makes no attempt to deal in detail with any of these aspects of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates ...”

“... Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to ...”

“... voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the notorious ‘white heat of technology’ but of huge expansion and transformative innovation in higher and further education. Unlike other academic historians, he actually changed the institutions and practices of his country, as well as emitting a cataract of written history ...”

“... Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in extraordinary projects such as Alexandra Road or Highgate New Town. This was the first part of the capital – and the country in general – to open itself up to the new ...”

“... it might be a clothesline, ‘old and dark grey’: ‘It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old ...”

“... to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington ...”

“... feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated ...”

“... are part-African’, Mechal Sobel argues that in 18th-century Virginia, despite the tyranny of white over black, cultural interaction occurred constantly. ‘Work became essentially a black domain, and working whites worked in it.’ On ‘King’ Carter’s estates in the 1730s, 1000 black slaves toiled under eight ...”

“... decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of ...”

“... bought in the sales, and seemed never to acquire a handbag: acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of ...”