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“... had seen television as a threat and largely ignored it. Lamb thought that a mistake, and instead took the opposite line of saturating his readers with stories about TV, on the grounds that, quite simply, it was what people were most interested in. In the first hundred days of Lamb’s editorship, the Sun’s circulation went from 650,000 to 1.5m copies. By ...”

“... article in Science about how well bloodhounds can smell. Feynman hates not being best, and so he took time off from inventing the atom bomb (he was working at Los Alamos) to run an experiment. He had his wife handle certain coke bottles in an empty six-pack while he was out of the room for a couple of minutes. Detection proved too easy: ‘As soon as you put ...”

“... of a film of Firbank toiling up the hill at Genzano on an expedition to Lake Nemi (a trip that took place, according to Lord Berners’s memoir of the writer, a few days before his death). A crowd of children, attracted by Firbank’s fatally idiosyncratic walk, collects and capers around him. The marionette of a man, on his last legs, had been picked on ...”

“... and trading primarily with Asia. The Ben Line operated a fleet of mainly cargo vessels which also took some passengers. There were fourteen passengers on board the Benvalla and the journey was supposed to take four weeks, including stops. But on 5 June, the day before we were supposed to pass through the Suez Canal, the Six-Day War broke out.The canal ...”

“... while in the new climate three years later a number of Dutch, German and Hungarian ex-Dadaists took part in the Dusseldorf and Weimar meetings to plan an avant-garde artists’ international. It was in this hopeful spirit that Constructivism first came to the Bauhaus. Kandinsky arrived to join the staff in June 1922, Moholy-Nagy in March 1923; and within a ...”

“... in the ethnic sense of a people joined by blood. Aly is not simply arguing that Hitler took from the rich and gave to the poor, but that the regime also supported the Volk at the expense of those deemed to be racially alien. The most memorable examples of this concern the activities of German soldiers outside Germany. When they occupied other ...”

“... crawling on our bellies a thousand feet below ground and we saw how the poor buggers lived. It took a lot of tea to get the dust out of our throats. The filming was good. We were all just first-timers doing our thing. He had such an analytical brain – I don’t want to say un-English, but he was persistent. As well as all that he had such a suave ability ...”

“... women’s factory teams to raise money for the war-wounded. On Christmas Day that year the side took on Arundel Coulthard Foundry in front of ten thousand spectators at Deepdale. The team continued to play after the war and toured France. On Boxing Day 1920, at the height of their fame, the Dick, Kerr Ladies played St Helens Ladies at Goodison Park, drawing ...”

“... noticed, they were looking (or Curzio was) for some headline-hitting coup. One hot afternoon they took a boring walk down to the local river, and came back with the first of the scarith, pulled out from under some surface scrub. Inside the package appeared to be the last will and testament, in Latin, of a first-century BC Volterran called Prospero; he ...”

“... not someone who grew sick of the publishing process and walked away, but someone who never took part in it. From a far distance, Pynchon’s identity seemed as mysterious and indecipherable as the Antikythera mechanism. When he won a National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow he sent a comedian to accept it in his place. Who could he be, this ...”

“... to the eldest son and heir? Not a bit: it seems to have come as quite a relief to her, although it took her some time to produce children of her own. She fitted as snugly in Emily’s bosom as did everyone else. Of course Emily was resented by some. Edward FitzGerald, the poet of Omar Khayyam, clearly could not stand her, but he was probably jealous of her ...”

“... that won their release after a couple of weeks. Voronel got his visa at the end of 1974, and Azbel took over the leadership of the seminar. Many other refusenik scientists were able to leave Russia during the next two years, but not Mark Azbel. Agitation on his behalf was kept up in Britain, although we never had the organisational effectiveness to match the ...”

“... had called him in to GosPlan in 1991 for a secret consultation on this thing called the market: he took Sachs to the GosPlan council chamber and spent an entire day, together with the largely silent ranks of his senior colleagues, questioning and listening to him. At the end of the day, Sachs said he would send a fax with a few of his thoughts on market ...”

“... might have herself planned the poisoning of a prominent courtier was unthinkable.’ So Forman took the blame, and at the trial and afterwards was vilified as a necromancer and charlatan. This will not do at all. In the 15th century it was absolutely normal for women of the high aristocracy to be accused of murdering personal or political enemies by ...”

“... At the start​ of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother ...”