“... coast in order to vote against the admission of women. He died just five weeks later. Going mixed may have felt traumatic for many men, but it raised existential questions for the women’s colleges. Like their male peers, young women were becoming less keen on single-sex institutions. As Ivy League universities moved to admit women, top schools like ...”

“... with amendments in the 1660s and 1690s, they ‘belonged’ to Pangbourne, where they began (they may even have had a settlement certificate to prove it, though few such certificates survive). The ratepayers of Pangbourne were legally required to ensure that the Soundys did not starve to death. The ratepayers of Battersea would provide so long as Pangbourne ...”

“... retreat from Asia, and how easily a charge of medism could be made to stick to a Theban, they may have had few real grounds. It was more likely his collusion with Athens that had stuck in the Spartan craw.It’s surprising that Cartledge does not take much interest in Ismenias (or Hismenias, a variant spelling), given how central he was to the sea change ...”

“... or the West Indies); that Charlemagne had a flowing white beard and cared about education (but he may have been most popular because his coronation date, 800, was so easy to remember); that Philip Augustus was a good king because he beat the Germans; that Catherine de Médicis was a bad woman because she killed so many Protestants; that Henri IV wanted every ...”

“... her annotated with comments in Churchill’s handwriting, though she is warned that his judgment may no longer be reliable. She lives on a boat on the Thames and constantly worries that she might inadvertently sink it. All this is related with a degree of amusement but one of the funniest sections in the book begins when, at the age of 22, an unplanned ...”

“... He tells me he already has three new books finished and ready for publication. One, a novel, may be called ‘Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton’ (Home is not a fan of George Orwell), and samples passages from classic London literature, reworked to make each paragraph exactly 100 words long. Another is called ‘Memphis Underground’, and is set in ...”

“... Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts ...”

“... that comes from disbelief, and perhaps his love pursuits were similarly energised. O’Gorman may have been intending to pursue some fancy thesis of this kind, but in the end he despaired of his attempts to ‘find a way to deal with this erotic element’ – indeed, the poet’s widow threatened to sue him if he kept on trying. His biography of Tate ...”

“... biggest names in sport and entertainment were conjoined in a seemingly ridiculous match. ‘They may have been the only two people in the country, at that moment, who could understand each other,’ Cramer explains. On their honeymoon he shared her with about 100,000 GIs in front of whom she appeared in Korea. ‘Joe, you never heard such cheering,’ she ...”

“... recidivism and squandered mercy are dismayingly mixed, though today’s inner-city care workers may find the basic elements of the tale familiar. It comes not from the War Cry but mainly from the voluminous diaries of Constance Maynard, a ‘social-purity activist’ and headmistress of Westfield College, founded to guide young women in Christian ...”

“... even inducing Egan to recite ‘poetry – was it?’ containing such lines as ‘The snake may be kind, we cannot know. Even our gentlest kill them with/Expedition, the automatic twelve-gauge shotgun.’ There’s also Dr Harvard, a more appropriately aged suitor who pines helplessly over Melanie Wooten. And across the lake, ignored by all, the insane ...”

“... physical chemistry, if other academics had been attacked. He said: ‘Myself for a start.’ In May he was in England when he got a phone call from his wife. His son Muhammad, a 22-year-old student, had been kidnapped and his house stripped. ‘They wanted $40,000 but I was able to reduce it to $7000.’ When Muhammad was returned, Dr Isa found he had been ...”

“... mind with the food of cooks who didn’t use recipe books at all. Whoever Apicius was (and it may be that he was an amalgam of various cooks), he was very keen on ‘surprise dishes’, such as ‘whitebait tart without whitebait’ and ‘salt fish without salt fish’, which sounds more Blumenthal than Smith. And what an odd view future archaeologists ...”

“... they would finally intone, ‘we remove all the heavy clouds that surround you, that you may again behold light and sunshine.’ Some months later, to fill the void left by parental death, they would offer him a young woman recently captured from an enemy tribe. The recipient of these demonstrations, for his own part, would know exactly how to ...”

“... Bey had put into his work a pack of easily exposed lies about himself. However self-deluded he may have been, he must have known in some fugitive part of himself that his enemies would not fail to hold him up to ridicule for these claims. Hence the portentousness of so much of what he writes, its insistent knowingness, the lordly airs he puts on, the ...”