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“... to replace the old Communist one, but it invariably leads only to an obsession with the repulsive. Flora Drew’s translation of The Noodle Maker is more graceful than the original, lacking the self-conscious rudeness of the Chinese and the uneasy kinship with Maoist style. The Nobel citation in 2000 described Gao Xingjian’s novel One Man’s Bible as a ...”

“... Ma Jian’s new novel, The Dark Road, also serves as an indictment of the Chinese government and the crimes it has committed in the name of modernisation. Its principal target is the one-child policy, imposed in 1978 and still officially in effect, which has led to mass campaigns of forced sterilisation and abortion, as well as infanticide and child trafficking ...”

“... gin went round. By and by supper came, when there appeared [Allan’s] spouse, the celebrated Miss Flora. She was a little woman, of a mild and genteel appearance, mighty soft and well-bred.’ What had he expected? The age of operatic heroines, loudly sacrificing all for love or liberty, had scarcely begun. But Boswell may have hoped for a more dramatic ...”

“... brother, Giuliano, in 1475. An elegantly eclectic poet in both Latin and Italian, Poliziano drew his images of goddesses and nymphs from the Greek and Latin poetic texts he later taught in the Florentine Studio or university. Like Botticelli, he combined his borrowings in new ways. And he described figures in motion – and the fluttering clothing and ...”

“... disciplined professional lives to the extension of detailed systems of knowledge. Even Darwin, who drew from the traditions of both the amateur and the specialist, wrote for circles of experts. The decline in reputation of amateurs such as Sir Joseph Banks and James Audubon, both of whom had counted themselves as naturalists, was largely the result of their ...”

“... be observed, Smith thought, they could also be mapped. William Smith’s survey, 1815. Smith drew his coloured strata directly onto a base map, made in 1794 by his publisher, the cartographer John Cary, before the fifteen sheets were engraved by assist­ants onto copper plates ready for reprinting – a process that took two years. He made several ...”

“... Birds (1797), Bewick had acquired national renown as the artist who most truthfully depicted the flora and fauna of the British countryside. Bewick’s achievement was both technical and aesthetic. Unlike most earlier book illustrators, he worked in wood, not copper. He took a vernacular skill and made it into an art, transforming the rude woodcut which had ...”

“... island ... I must call on you to make your election between the Times and your other masters.’ Flora Shaw, the paper’s first woman correspondent, egged on the conspirators in the Jameson Raid. ‘It was hardly in the best traditions of the paper,’ writes Heren, ‘but being a good journalist she insisted that the raid must not take place on a ...”

“... witnessed a meteor shower, collected rocks and handled electric eels; he made close studies of the flora and fauna (including the human fauna); he examined everything from the properties of guano to the prospects for sugar plantations. And wherever he went he measured – heights, angles, distances, temperatures. Humboldt wrote to fellow scientists throughout ...”

“... An outsider​ by birth as well as by disposition, Flora Thompson took solitary pleasure in observing her fellow villagers. She stored away characters and scenes from an early age – the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest – but published nothing until she was in her thirties, and nothing on her childhood until her early sixties ...”

“... of interpretations and been put to a great many uses. The world-historical system of Joachim of Flora, almost eight centuries old, turns up all over the place in Blake, in D.H. Lawrence, in Hegel and Hitler, in the sects studied by Christopher Hill. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which had its place in every Elizabethan church, provided a world history with ...”

“... With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point ...”

“... published by two Cambridge geologists in the following year. Two years later again, Tuzo Wilson drew on his studies of earthquake faults to suggest that the crust was divided into plates, which could slide over and alongside one another, as well as diverging. In 1967, Jason Morgan and Dan McKenzie independently worked out how these plates could move about ...”

“... with its strange combination of fiery rebellion and almost craven awe of royalty? Flora MacDonald, who risked her life after Culloden to save her prince from George II’s soldiers, would later risk it again fighting for his grandson George III against Americans seeking independence. How was that possible?Such speculations don’t detain ...”

“... recommended the Ethiopian Story, alongside the Aeneid, as a model of epic construction; Tasso drew on its heroine for his Clorinda. Rabelais made Pan-tagruel drowse over Heliodorus. Cervantes ‘dared to compete’ with Heliodorus in his last work, Persiles y Sigismunda. Heliodorus bulks large in Sidney’s Arcadia; through Sidney he provides the sub-plot ...”