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“... Last week I took 61,240 steps, covering 28.88 miles, and climbed the equivalent of 142 flights of stairs – not bad, but not as good as the week before, when I took 67,131 steps, covering 31.66 miles, and climbed 122 flights. I note with gloom that even then I failed to make my target of ten thousand steps a day ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... Party Conference of June 1988 had left off. Then followed an uneasy month while Mikhail Gorbachev took his annual vacation. As last year, some members of the leadership took advantage of his absence to make thinly-veiled attacks on current policies, claiming that socialism was being undermined. Pessimistic rumours about his ...”

“... First came the monied retirees, who triggered off the real-estate boom (this is the background to John D. MacDonald’s underrated Condominium). Secondly, the mind-boggling sums of money generated by middle-class America’s insatiable appetite for prohibited cocaine. Thirdly, the invasion by criminal classes educated in villainy outside the US – in ...”

“... Blackwood’s Magazine in 1892, in a review more or less contemporary with the novel, Mrs Oliphant took the same view. But in 1968 Tony Tanner took both social injustice and Sophoclean irony for granted, observing that ‘she who is raped lives to be hanged.’ Sutherland makes the permissible retort that she who was seduced ...”

“... of warfare hope will animate the rank and file, they themselves do not necessarily share them. As John Keegan pungently demonstrates, warfare since tribal times has always been divided more or less unevenly between those who direct it, those who enjoy it (in different contexts and for different reasons) and those who suffer it. This last class would ...”

“... were evidently as unexcited by the number plans as we are by Dickensian armchairs. Dickens himself took care to preserve his memoranda with the manuscripts of his works, and passed them on to Forster. In his life of Dickens, Forster alludes to the working notes but mainly leaves the impression that the author’s planning was principally carried out in ...”

“... that can never grow big enough or quickly enough to challenge the big investment banks, so Corzine took the company into the business of trading on its own account. In that capacity, it made huge investments – read, bets – on sovereign debt in the EU. The timing of this was roughly equivalent to making a huge punt on the prospects of airships, just as the ...”

“... deny its role in Freeman’s resignation. The Aipac spokesman Josh Block said his organisation ‘took no position on this matter and did not lobby the Hill on it’. The Washington Post, whose editorial page is run by Fred Hiatt, a man staunchly committed to the special relationship, ran an editorial which claimed that blaming the lobby for Freeman’s ...”

“... Yugoslavia and Greece were covered up – which also suited the Allies, especially as the Cold War took hold. Italian collaboration in the massacres of civilians inside the country wasn’t highlighted. Focardi quotes Ernest Renan: ‘the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common and also that they have forgotten many ...”

“... would have been at home in Latin, which is where the obsessively well-prepared Flaubert no doubt took it from when he was reading up for his novel. The Romans, like the Greeks before them, used the circumflex for phonetic purposes, as a graphic index to how the speaker’s voice was to behave in pronouncing particular vowels – the accented vowel in ...”

“... us.’ The ad is a joke but the company, and the man who founded it, are not. Michele Ferrero took over the family sweet firm in the 1950s and turned it into a continent-wide market leader, with a turnover of €6.2 billion. In the process he was responsible for the invention of Ferrero Rocher (of course) but also Nutella, Kinder eggs and Tic Tacs. The ...”

“... for work and power of mind, combined with Victoria’s frequent pregnancies, meant that he soon took effective charge of royal affairs. He often dealt with politicians directly, was always present when the Queen saw her ministers, drafted most of Victoria’s letters and memoranda, guided her in the formulation of all of her opinions, and became in ...”

“... a prophet honour in his own country. But Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their Götterdämmerung. Simon Heffer gives a useful account of the ‘long and damaging fall from the pedestal’ in the first chapter of his 1995 Life of Carlyle. The extent of that fall can also be gauged in the acres of cheap Victorian ...”

“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”