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“... relations. But Power’s aircraft was soon supplemented with the spy satellites whose development William Burrows traces. Today, they can photograph every part of the world in minute detail. They are assisted by more and more powerful computers which can use the photographs to ‘produce three-dimensional images of extraordinary depth and ...”

“... and his wife of ten years, Mary Anne Hanson. She had for some time been having an affair with William Rowland Alder, a lawyer. The pair abused and mocked Lord Portsmouth, both physically and mentally, even making him a spectator to their fornication. These details came to light through a legal instrument known as a ‘commission in lunacy’, whose roots ...”

“... above all, he loved wombats. Rossetti mourning his wombat. He had two, one named Top after William Morris, whose nickname ‘Topsy’ came from his head of tight curls. In September 1869, Rossetti wrote in a letter that the wombat had successfully interrupted a seemingly uninterruptable monologue by John Ruskin by burrowing its nose between the ...”

“... 28 July 1609. It was the crew of that ship who became the first castaways on the island, including William Strachey, who wrote a dramatic account of the storm in a 3000-word letter to an unidentified ‘excellent lady’ in London, which is vividly echoed in the first scene of The Tempest. It was the survivors of that shipwreck that later became the first ...”

“... we see the characteristic transformation of the external into an image of his mental state.) As he burrows deeper into his grief, the meaning of the image expands – he speaks of the yellow rain of time, of the yellow rain of oblivion – until the notion of the yellow rain itself becomes a kind of yellow rain, covering everything in his mind. Yellow stains ...”

“... ills missed the point. Such complaints were tired restatements of the early 19th-century radical William Cobbett’s claim that Britain was smothered by a monstrous network of corruption, which he labelled the ‘Thing’. In the 1960s, no such powerful clique of reactionaries existed; instead, the problem was the failure of Britain’s various small centres ...”

“... have been repeatedly recruited to offer support for the scientific or social arguments of the day. William Kirby, a parson-naturalist of the early 19th century, sought support from the ordered world of social insects for a kind of high church Toryism, and found evidence there of design in Nature ordered by God’s almighty hand. Even at the time, his ...”

“... Hendrie are distinctive and valuable contributions to knowledge. More unexpectedly, so is Donald Burrows’s account of Handel’s relationship with the court of Hanover, for we might have thought that German scholars would have done all that. But no, Hanover, like many of the other German courts, remains shadowy to music historians. ...”

“... to east, tracked by property speculators staying ahead of the game, becomes a warren of invasive burrows in every direction. Huge tunnelling monsters summon up the Megalosaurus referenced by Dickens, at the dawn of the first railway age, in the opening of Bleak House, ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. Mere ‘foot ...”

“... view are certainly great, and are as rich in the present book as in its predecessors. He burrows in all the media and always comes back with some choice morsel between his jaws. How significant it is, or so he makes it seem (but we need to ponder what the significance is), that, in the government-sponsored film of the Somme offensive in 1916, there ...”

“... forthcoming obituary, in the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, of Sir William Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained ...”

“... It is this aspect of the paedophile predicament which is so sympathetically captured by William Golding in his portrait of Mr Pedigree, the poor benighted soul who haunts the municipal parks of Greenfield in Darkness Visible. Mr Pedigree is described as ‘stuck like a broken gramophone record’. Carpenter’s insistence on researching the last ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”