“... at Cana, hitherto assigned to some anonymous ‘Alchemical Master’: this discovery is one of the major satisfactions for the reader who has read the works of the trilogy in the order of their publication. This is not the same, however, as the chronological order of the events they describe. The Rebel Angels, the first novel of the trilogy, begins shortly ...”

“... in 1660 is apparent. More revealing was the seal’s association of freedom with what the royalist John Evelyn, surveying the measures of early 1649, scathingly termed ‘unkingship’. Corruption, even tyranny, are the inexorable accompaniments of monarchy because of the fawning and flattery kings always engender in others. Monarchy is dangerous since all ...”

“... of biography immortalised by one author’s comment in a Life of St Teresa of Avila that ‘St John of the Cross bit his lip.’ If Feinstein has ever come under the influence of this school, which I doubt, she has long since renounced it. When she wishes to give us a telling visual detail she selects, if not from actual documents then from very strong ...”

“... has been rare among British historians for a single scholar both to sponsor and draw to himself a major field of study. Urban history in Britain was given its lead by the union in Dyos’s mind of history and the social sciences, applied, not to a period or a theme, but to a phenomenon – the city. It was he, more than any other, who, late in the 1950s, hit ...”

“... and industrial centre of the world. Not all the Continental Europeans in London and the other major cities were political refugees. Of the Germans, many were businessmen, artists, musicians and scholars. They may have had a political preference for liberal England, especially if they were Jews, which many of them were: but if they did settle here, it was ...”

“... credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the critical experiments, and James Collip who extracted the insulin; Macleod was the lab chief. Since even scientists themselves have difficulty in accurately assigning credit ...”

“... the World War I Moves and the Ruins of Conceptualism by Terry Atkinson, who was one of the major players in the Coventry disputes. It accompanies his exhibition currently at the Corner-house Gallery in Manchester. Atkinson is showing new paintings but writes obsessively and partially about Coventry. It’s awfully long and full of footnotes and ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... within classics as a discipline. In Compromising Traditions (a collection of essays deriving from major – now notorious – panels at classical conferences in both the US and the UK), the target is more specifically the rhetoric of classical scholarship, and the politics of how (as much as what) we write about antiquity and its literature. In a ...”

“... put it: ‘We’ve given all you people need to know.’ Even Republicans don’t like Mitt. (John McCain thought the inimitable Sarah Palin a better choice as his running mate.) At the convention, it was astonishing how many speakers barely mentioned the presidential candidate at all. In the end, there was almost nothing for a good Republican to say. His ...”

“... as its central drama. Willughby died in 1672 aged 36, before he had finished any of the major works which bear his name – just a few papers on wasp behaviour had been published by the Royal Society, to which he had been admitted in 1661. But by the time of his death he had completed an extraordinary amount of highly original research, made ...”

“... to lob a missile into the men’s room of the Kremlin if the Soviets misbehaved. Goldwater, a major-general in the air force reserve, aroused widespread alarm, especially among alumni of the Manhattan bomb project. Goldwater’s nuclear bravado brought about an unprecedented – and still unmatched – mobilisation of scientists in support of Lyndon ...”

“... Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real and imaginary, deliberately extinguish some aspect of their personality in order to find out a hidden (and often unpleasant) truth. Levine calls these willed acts of self-suppression ‘something ...”

“... purpose, it could turn them to murder. Indian police reports regularly associated the drug with major crime. It was also thought to induce madness. Insane asylums claimed that substantial proportions of their inmates had come to them in this way. You could tell which they were simply by looking at them, Surgeon Hutchinson of the Patna asylum wrote in ...”

“... to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army officers at a time when the major threat to the nation was believed to come from the Catholic states of Europe. He then packed the 12-judge court which was going to decide the legality of what he was doing. The consequent finding in favour of a regal power to suspend or dispense with ...”