“... occasionally licking the floor as they did so. Some men and women levitated (Catholics proved more proficient at the practice than Protestants); others threw the process into reverse, gaining so much weight that they were impossible to budge. A late 17th-century German demoniac is reputed to have coughed up four hundred chamberpots’ worth of blood. Some ...”

“... of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that ...”

“... Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son dégoût), but that is the point: the ease of unassorted reference, the sense of play continuing where seriousness would have ...”

“... number (divisors 14, 7, 4, 2, 1), and 28 arguments for the existence of God might have been more than enough. But 36 is a perfect number of perfect numbers: a perfect square, and it’s twice 18, a deeply lucky number according to the Kabbalistic ‘gematria’ system of assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters (the letters of chai, the Hebrew for ...”

“... kill each other. In most murder fictions these dark pleasures are overlaid by other, superficially more respectable, kinds of interest. Murder fictions let us test our hypotheses about how and why people act. They may also suggest that the things we do when we read most narratives – forming inferences, seeking intelligibility, constructing hypotheses that ...”

“... the south-east coast of Sicily and then again at Salerno, had gone so badly, causing many hundreds more fatalities than had been expected, that it was only prudent of my father to anticipate his own death at Anzio. What he now needed was to write something that would serve as a last letter if he was killed tomorrow, but wouldn’t unduly upset Monica with ...”

“... that ‘I am old and I feel and look old.’ Her frankness is rare. Old age, as it becomes more common, is talked about less. If old people are praised for anything it is usually for being ‘splendid’ in some unspecified way which really means, as Miller points out, that they don’t look or seem truly old. In obituaries of long-lived public figures ...”

“... of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to have known everyone: politicians, poets, novelists, painters, journalists, soldiers, clerics, even civil servants if they were sufficiently close to ministers to be worth knowing. During the 1790s, when the social networks in ...”

“... in Washington brought ecstatic reviews (‘we know of no pianist like him at any age ... something more than extraordinary’). He played once in New York and Columbia Records offered him a contract on the spot – which was unheard of. His first recording with Columbia – Bach’s Goldberg Variations – was the best-selling classical record of 1956 and ...”

“... the Restoration, and hanged at Tyburn in a posthumous execution. The Tyburn Tree plaque seems even more modest when compared with the elephantine public sculptures that have been deposited at Cumberland Gate. In a poem written for a BBC documentary in 1968, John Betjeman described the site as a place of martyrdom ‘trodden by unheeding feet’. The ...”

“... telling pen-portraits. Beschloss has benefited from the accumulation of memoirs, and of US and, more recently, Soviet archive material, over the intervening years. He has also gained from the release of translator’s notes of the Vienna summit in 1961, from White House conversations taped by Kennedy (years before Nixon), and from the records of conferences ...”

“... In his novels, the late Gwyn Thomas used to refer to those who frequented the pubs and cafés of small Welsh towns as ‘the voters’. It would certainly be the way to describe the adult population of France who, last spring, voted twice to elect a President (on 24 April and 8 May) and twice to elect a Parliament (on 5 and 12 June ...”

“... of Romanticism, the neglect of Lecky and new-wave social science, the scatological treatment of Thomas Carlyle. Other omissions may be added. Frederic Maitland is not very well realised, which is strange given the historians (Kenyon among them) who believe in his greatness. Maitland’s relationship with Leslie Stephen and avid interest in Meredith’s ...”

“... identity has been embodied in daily sequences of radio and television programmes. Those at the more serious end of the broadcasting spectrum, and their manner of presentation, afford an ideal barometer of cultural health – better, for example, than any study of reading habits. Called in today to construct a serious radio network, which criteria would one ...”

“... the less respectable details of her life. She was not, in fact, Mrs Leonowens, widow of Major Thomas Leonowens of the Indian Army, but the widow of a mere Mr Owens (given name, Thomas Leon), identified on his death certificate as a ‘Hotel Master’ in the British settlement of Penang. Her father was a poor army ...”