“... of waltzes, polkas and dance music. The bandsman had them under excellent control; he everywhere took the time well and the instruments preserved it . . . I have seldom heard a regimental band more perfect than this handful of workmen, located far from any place where they might command the benefits of hearing other bands, in the mountains of Wales ...”

“... I succeeded. My mother gave me her devotion for the rest of her life.’In England, Geoffrey took up the post of warden of Lee Abbey, a Christian evangelical community on Exmoor; later the family moved to Hull, where he became a bishop, and then to Bradford. This upbringing was sheltered, unworldly and spartan: the exactions of a pastor’s family ...”

“... was at last so saucy, that the Justice found he was half-Drunk, and set him in the Stocks, and took care afterwards to have him punish’d too for some other Mis-Behaviour; but all the Justice or the Clothier cou’d do, cou’d not make him finish his Piece of Work, till he pleas’d, and that was a good while after.’ The fictional putdown is ...”

“... This book is about the career of John Soane up to the age of 31. As Soane only started to build when he was 28, as all his important work was done after he was 35, as he practised architecture till his retirement at 80 and died at 83, it will be seen that the biographical coverage is likely to attract the dedicated specialist rather than the general reader ...”

“... the murder of two small girls in Soham, whose deaths, as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this detachable part of the crime scene brought into court, to authenticate a pathologist’s testimony, even though there was nothing remotely ...”

“... become the world’s first trillionaire. That means he will be worth a thousand billionaires. As John Allen Paulos demonstrated in his book Innumeracy, most of us have a poor grasp of what numbers on this scale mean; so take a second to guess, intuitively, what you think the difference in time is between a million seconds and a billion seconds. Ready? A ...”

“... by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser ...”

“... settled that, they swore an oath of secrecy, and received communion at a Mass said by the Jesuit John Gerard, who was in the next room: they presumably understood this as turning their undertaking into a religious vow and conjoining them in sacred solidarity. The first part of the scheme went with absurd facility. The conspirators rented some lodgings which ...”

“... in the Suburbs’,* the genius of this style of gardening was the great horticulturalist John Claudius Loudoun (a road in St John’s Wood is named after him), who in 1838 published his Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion. Loudoun’s idea was the ‘gardenesque’, and his rhetorical style, very much in the mode ...”

“... all to itself in the National Gallery; but I doubt if anyone has gone into it so pertinaciously as John North. North is an expert in the history of astronomy and mathematics, so naturally his view of the painting emerges from the jumble, which he does not regard as a jumble, of astronomical and time-telling instruments sitting on top of the carpet-covered ...”

“... Is it possible for a novelist to write too well? This has sometimes seemed to be the case with John Updike, whose ability to evoke physical detail is unmatched. It is a virtue in accordance with his expressedly realist aesthetic. ‘My own style seemed to be a groping and elemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena, and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is what it wasn’t – other-indulgent, rather ...”

“... vehement piece on the treatment of bleeding gums. It was signed Dr Louis F. Destouches and it took issue, in a blizzard of exclamation-marks, with the medicine of the schools, asking what good the professoriat and the textbooks were to a confused general practitioner, who wanted to do something simply therapeutic for his patients. This irascible, very ...”

“... whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A disillusioned devotee is the worst that can happen to them; and although I enjoyed rereading Twenty Thousand Streets and reviewing it in these ...”

“... the plane in the air, so Tracy masters her fear of falling when falling in love. But while Jong took her inspiration from the hard-boiled egotistic journalism of Henry Miller, Dick has digested new theory to write her novel: ‘When we make love,’ she observes (without apparent facetiousness), ‘the switch of masculine/feminine signifiers is ...”

“... dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were held in Lewis’s Magdalen sitting room on Thursday evenings. Members drank tea and beer, argued about the meaning of ...”