“... interest of mine, especially the earliest traces of human settlement, which my excavations suggest took place 12,000 years ago or very soon afterwards. That’s nothing compared to the age of the bedrock of the island, much of which is Precambrian, dating to 1.8 billion years ago. For years I’ve walked across that bedrock with my mind fixed on the human ...”

“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

“... was entering a large metal box, and another rack-full was emerging. Machinery firmly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died, of the rest the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the ...”

“... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...”

“... thrusting a slice at him and beaming. He has always loathed the stuff, but ‘in less time than it took to think the thought, I realised that she couldn’t help herself. She genuinely loved me ... but a short-circuit in her psyche prevented her from empathising, from making that step outside of her feelings into mine.’ He takes a big bite and feigns ...”

“... cotton plantations of the deep South, was sufficient to discourage thoughts of freedom. Douglass took the risk, but his first attempt failed, leading to his and his accomplices’ immediate arrest. That misfortune, however, was followed by a piece of astounding good luck. In a decision that is still difficult to fathom, instead of punishing him the ...”

“... of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment ...”

“... swollen with blood. All were given the same treatment. This was the point at which the vampire took on a life of its own in Western popular culture. Reportage, legend and fiction combined to create its modern form and to sever it from its tangled roots in folklore. Most of the tropes that came to define the vampire – neck-biting, blood-drinking or ...”

“... On the evening​ of 24 November 1848, Pope Pius IX fled from the city of Rome. At 5 p.m., he took off his Moroccan silk slippers with crosses embroidered on their uppers, put aside the red velvet papal cap and dressed himself in the black cassock and broad-brimmed hat of a country priest. Half an hour later, in a state of great agitation, he left the papal audience chamber in the Quirinale Palace by an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for him ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... is a long-forgotten 19th-century French economist – French no less (it wasn’t so long ago that John Kerry was derided for being ‘a bit French’). Indeed, hands up who has even heard of Frédéric Bastiat. The name, canonical and talismanic in Tea Party circles, means nothing to most British economists. Nineteenth-century France produced some eccentric ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... utterly unbomblike, as was the cardboard box with the word ‘bomb’ written on it that the paper took into Windsor Castle in the back of a van. The Investigator got into Sandhurst by applying to visit the library, which is open to the public by appointment. There’s no way of knowing whether or not any security checks were run on him, since if he was ...”

“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been an abandoned child, found, by whom is not ...”

“... they had adopted this course in order to let me understand that it was as well to withdraw. I took the hint, and managed to rejoin modern civilisation in the shape of the barouche kindly placed at my service by the authorities in the great outer square.’ The recognition of Kipling as a Sahib generates in the narrative the stylistic markers of cultural ...”