“... his own country, and none of the work published in his lifetime was written in France. Descartes may have renounced his family, but he nevertheless bore their stamp and never forgot who he was. One of the properties he sold in the 1620s was a small farm called Le Perron, and in later life he intermittently styled himself sieur du Perron, possibly, as Watson ...”

“... as incompatible with a notion of theory as having to be implanted by an avant-garde. The workers may come to see that they are exploited, but they will hardly come to grasp the finer details of surplus value or the Asiatic mode of production merely by feeling hard done by. Mechanical materialism must be resisted: insurrection is an art, a semi-intuitive ...”

“... never asked if their dad might die. Perhaps it never occurred to them that people who fall ill may die. The X-ray is an image that has to be drawn out of ourselves that we might see it in front of our eyes and so take it within ourselves again. Out of the lungs and into the brain. From Phil’s hospital bed we could see the lightbox where the doctors ...”

“... On 7 May 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville ...”

“... self-determination the sole measure of social legitimacy. It is as if, in Carrère’s mind, the May ‘68 slogan, sous les pavés, la plage, has flattened out into the vision of Romand’s null existence, as he drives round the countryside: ‘a vast beach of dead and empty ...”

“... room outclassed that of the company. As somebody sang in Iolanthe, Hearts just as pure and fair May beat in Belgrave Square As in the lowly air Of Seven ...”

“... for him to impose his mistress, Lady Jersey, on his wife as her lady-in-waiting was odious. George may have come to be called ‘the first gentleman of Europe’, but he was not, as the Duke of Wellington is said to have told him, a gentleman. At his famous first meeting with Caroline, she evidently smelt; he called for brandy and then boorishly left the ...”

“... conditions of Fascist Italy (the Racial Laws were enacted in 1938) and the imminent threat of war may well have shaped these choices and given rise to an encoded quality in the writing. But how hermetic are the poems? Arrow-smith appended voluminous notes to his translations. Galassi, too, includes 170 pages or so of notes in small print, quoting from a range ...”

“... Scott back in Northampton. This time his movements after discharge cannot be fully traced. But in May 1897 he lay dying, with horrible irony, in Sir Gilbert’s Midland Hotel, St Pancras. Here his children were just in time to see him before he succumbed, of ‘acute cirrhosis of liver and heart disease’. From this unhappy story, Stamp singles out two ...”

“... got to when her sense of her own rightness began to override her sense of external reality. It may be too simple to say, as Clare Short said, quoting an unnamed Tory, that ‘no one ever leaves Downing Street entirely sane.’ But there is a moment in most premierships when it is clear that the external world no longer counts quite as much in the Prime ...”

“... headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years later, of the Kentish boy, Ted Heath: ‘Hengist and Horsa were very dull people. Now, as you know, they colonised Kent; consequently the people of Kent have ever since been very ...”

“... and tides, planets and pendulums by celestial law and geometrical order. However surprising it may seem, even the English title, ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’, was, according to Newton, designed to help the book sell. Long before scientific popularisation became the common salvation of hard-pressed publishers, Newtonianism spawned ...”

“... motorist risked having an advertisement inserted in his home-town newspaper informing ‘whom it may concern’ that Mr X. Y. had been requested to leave his hotel in such-and-such a town for entertaining in his room a lady not his wife (for more about this collusive racket made possible under the Mann Act, which was intended to discourage ‘white ...”

“... his walk back from the letterbox he looked at the dog again, and the dog stared back, adding: It may be hot but I’m still lying on this car. Before opening the garden door he turned for a final glance.     – What did it do? I urged him, because he was laughing quietly and richly to himself.     It lifted its head from its paws and straightened ...”

“... and whether Holmes seems to be an Oxford or a Cambridge man), but even the most fetishistic fan may not want to know the exact weight of a trout once caught by Conan Doyle’s second wife, or what cut of coat he married her in. Rather as Sexton Blake’s name never appears without the epithet ‘the world-famous detective’, Stashower seems to think that ...”