“... Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in white, or Lewis Carroll’s little girl lost in a ...”

“... The 11-year-old found raped and possibly murdered next to a canal in a small town outside the city may or not be the girl in the newspaper in the prostitute’s room; according to the post-mortem report, she was wearing a red frock at the time of her death, like the girl on the cover. What do these connections add up to? As if to uncover their significance, a ...”

“... to sleep right through. Our own sleep patterns are profoundly artificial and unnatural, which may be why so many of us need sleeping pills to get what we think of as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little ...”

“... to look down on them. But from where I was standing to be so flagrant was luxury untold. They may have been outsiders, but to my mind they embodied the proud spirit of the ballroom more than anybody else. Nobody could touch them. They could be sure they would go on for ever because they already had. Back to the beginning, they trailed their ...”

“... relationship with Bellone was a close one, and Biocca and Canali speculate that Bellone may have acted as a father-figure to the informer. Silone was an orphan who had lost his father early and most of his other relatives, including his mother, in an earthquake in 1915. At any rate, if this book has a hero, it is Bellone the sensitive ...”

“... and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt. Kleinzahler may here seem to assume the all-registering consciousness of the Williams of Paterson, but Williams felt compelled to develop some kind of representative – even epic – meaning out of Paterson’s history, while Kleinzahler is at leisure to savour the rank ...”

“... in a storm, imprudently swears that he ‘will see home tonight, in spite of the last tempest, or may I never see home!’ He is doomed to wander the back roads for decades, until a travelling merchant takes pity and escorts him to New York City, which is in the process of becoming the great American entrepôt of the 19th century. Poor Rugg is completely ...”

“... water and full-spectrum white light cannot explain every shimmer and break in real rainbows, which may be subject to, for example, filtered sunlight, larger or smaller raindrops and drops flattened by their fall through the air. In 1838, George Biddell Airy published a ‘complete theory’ of the rainbow but, despite giving a good mathematical description of ...”

“... it is – or we are – waging war. The IDF didn’t play any role in either of the Gulf wars and may not play a part in Bush’s pending war in Iran, but it is on permanent alert for the real war that is always just round the corner. Meanwhile, it harasses Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to very destructive effect. (In July it killed 176 ...”

“... John Smith had scarcely landed in Virginia in 1607 when he wrote that in America, ‘every man may be the master and owner of his own labour and land.’ This vision of economic freedom was to draw millions of newcomers to North America and inspired a relentless westward flow of population. Dispossessing the Indians was, from the beginning, intrinsic to ...”

“... By the time we got back from the pub, Kerry had lost. The politics nerd is showing signs that he may be going to stop teasing me quite soon. I blame the blogs. Specifically, for getting my hopes up in the first place, I blame electoral-vote.com, which had an interactive map of poll results arranged state by state, and mysterypollster.com. (The mystery ...”

“... condensed milk or cabbages, even if her family were starving (as, at bad times in the 1920s, she may have feared they might). She did not need what she stole. She could not have sold the books. She couldn’t even let anyone know she had them. She couldn’t risk taking them back. All she could do, as best she could, was read the damn things.When I knew ...”

“... second term we take Frank’s lungs out. They are shapely grey sponges speckled with soot (which may mean only that he lived in a city, not necessarily that he was – sharp breath – a smoker). They are also bigger than the hole we have to squeeze them through, and well-anchored. Even with our increased confidence it’s hard to see where to cut. At ...”

“... facilities in hospitals remains only an aspiration. And the microbes are evolving in real time. In May 1900 the ‘Report of Drs Mott and Durham on Colitis or Asylum Dysentery’ was presented to the Asylums Committee of the London County Council. Among other things, Mott and Durham recommended that accommodation provided for isolation should not be used for ...”

“... of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the United States, among others, share with ...”