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“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... testimony to the unsatisfactoriness of all the ways of referring to the most important and (pace John Vincent, who has been wonderfully at it again) the most interesting person pondered in the book. There is no one way that is neutral, or natural, or complete, of referring to Sir Oswald Mosley in this book, nor could there be. And if the difficulties of ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them in Parliament were ...”

“... achievements is not difficult since the greatest of these murals are in Parisian churches.Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff, is a five-minute walk from the Gare du Nord (also by Hittorff). It was consecrated in 1844 and, because Hittorff was an authority on the use of colour in ancient temples, was intended to have a polychrome ...”

“... are logarithms, a type of mathematical operation first described by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. If you are multiplying a number p by itself to get another number q, the logarithm of q to base p is how many times you need to do the multiplication to reach q. So the logarithm of 8 to base 2 is 3, because you have to multiply 2 by itself ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in ...”

“... own perfectionism and vanity. Isaacson records a representative exchange between Jobs and James Vincent of the advertising firm TBWA, which helped come up with Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign. Years later, Vincent was Jobs’s contact in the team hired to produce ads for the iPad’s launch: JOBS: Your ...”

“... was a lipogrammatic novel written earlier this century by ‘an American sailor’ called Ernest Vincent Wright. It was published in Los Angeles in 1939 and declared its achievement in its subtitle: Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter E – can this have been a lipogrammatical Grat Gatsby? American sailors nothing: word-game players ...”

“... into the lives of others,’ claims the dustjacket of The Oxford Book of Letters. In contrast, Vincent Kaufmann cheerfully introduces his study of writers’ letters by admitting that ‘there is nothing more tedious in a writer’s work than his correspondence.’ Thrilling or tedious? Isn’t this somehow the question always raised by the prospect of ...”

“... the autonomous play of language and its yield in a tissue of signs. A considerable novelist like John Fowles can take as the starting-point of A Maggot the weaving of an apparently inconsequential pattern – for a ‘maggot’ is, in one of its meanings, a dance-tune. But Fowles is here an interesting case, because he actively recalls the 18th-century ...”

“... Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent Donehue’s Lonelyhearts (1958) to Raoul Lévy’s The Defector (1966), the caesura provided by the spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at ...”

“... sometimes not: and usually, in adroit anti-climax, the camera tracked to the smiling features of Vincent Price or Boris Karloff, dapper in antique costume or Victorian evening wear, surveying her discomfiture with sinister benevolence. What followed could have been avoided if the heroine had scampered safely back to bed, but of course she didn’t; and her ...”