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“... too unreliable, Pyke adopted the notion, developed by American scientists, of reinforcing it with wood-pulp: the startlingly tough, rigid material that resulted was christened Pykrete (it’s a minor oddity, given Foden’s pedantry about Habbakuk/ Habakkuk, that he spells this Pykerete). Before the project was called off in late 1943, a good deal of work had ...”

“... neglect. Syrians who for years avoided the dilapidated bazaars are revisiting the charm of mud and wood, stone and marble, running fountains and cobbled paths too narrow for cars. A few landlords are turning their empty palaces into hotels, restaurants and bars where the young stay late into the night in jasmine-scented courtyards to savour water pipes as ...”

“... upon the fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His ...”

“... any sort of ponderous Van der Post with his laboured shamanistic aesthetic and the vacuous Charles Windsor nodding sagely at his elbow. Bellum didn’t know about the Mantis mating with the Eland and giving birth to the Moon. Bellum’s circumstances didn’t leave a hell of a lot of room for mysticism. But in his coarse, stultifying, urban world he ...”

“... There aren’t many novels with exclamation marks in their titles. Used without irony – as in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! – they strive too hard, leaving us no room for manoeuvre. Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner and Look at the Harlequins! by Nabokov, on the other hand, are more subtle, creating some distance between us and their tellers, if not their tales ...”

“... as the Allegory of Painting (c.1638-39), completed while Artemisia was in London at the court of Charles I, comes nearest to suggesting that its maker embodies what for everyone else remains an abstraction. The young female painter at work in the composition is a close match for Cesare Ripa’s iconography of ‘Painting’: she has the requisite black hair ...”

“... until 1650, but was privately circulated in 1640, when Parliament was finally convened by Charles I for the first time in 11 years, and members of the Short Parliament were vociferously denouncing the king’s attacks on liberty. Later that year, Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him in danger. He would remain in ...”

“... agenda for debate on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline ...”

“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 expedition to ...”

“... wrote a chaplain, ‘everything is English – even to the chimney fire. Here where wood is in such plenty, the Englishman fetches his coal from home.’ Only a small minority attempted to learn Russian and a bilingual guide to the basic vocabulary was obliged to point out that ‘’tis a Language of great use in this country: & without it one ...”

“... made early use of microscopy to identify cells in what could thereby be identified as fossilised wood, and Nicolas Steno dissected a shark’s head to demonstrate that the well known fossils called glossopetrae, ‘tongue-stones’, found embedded in rocks on land, had once been sharks’ teeth, and must have come from sharks much larger than any currently ...”

“... the well frozen, I mean the bucket frozen in it, and the floors dirty with muddy feet and dogs and wood-dirt and ashes-dust, and the whole front of the house shut like a tomb because no one has the strength to keep it warmed, and three human beings living in one room with the dogs, and the swill having to be cooked for the hogs, and a sick lamb in the ...”

“... for walks, he chatted with the maid who, like himself, was from the country. Maugham has skipped Charles’s undistinguished boyhood at boarding school; his dutiful epistolary regime; his rapport with the maid (the only woman that a boy who missed his mother got to be near). He systematically blurs our view of ...”

“... wonders which was which,’ Grigson writes. An orangutan was called a ‘wild man of the wood’; a ‘woman-tyger’ or ‘man-tyger’ was a mandrill; and a ‘child of the sun’ was a baboon. One baboon caused a stir in 1784, overshadowing even Mrs Siddons’s stage performances. The ‘Siddonian rage’ was displaced by ‘savage ...”

“... an angle and a distance, even a muffled quirkiness, which makes them quite different from those of Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis in similar stories. Audiences, I suspect, picked up on this without thinking much about it, so that it became part of the public perception of the Eastwood character, a sort of submerged joke not about violence as a social reality ...”