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“... of steps you have to climb to see anyone at all.’ Although it doesn’t mention Leopardi, Daniel Pick’s book is very much about such visits, the dreams Rome inspires and so often disappoints, the city’s place in Italy’s and indeed Europe’s collective psychology. Defeatist by vocation, Leopardi was not the man to do anything about the gap ...”

“... Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed scrutiny. It may be worth asking how Lever (born 1806) contrived to predate Jane ...”

“... account of a love affair between two Harvard students with the antiseptically Wasp names of Elgin Smith and Caroline Hedges. Brodkey means to suggest the discrepancy between his characters’ sexual appetites and then emotional needs, but the story suffers from the fact that he feels obliged to break off the narrative each time they start undressing. He has ...”

“... less overwhelmingly a visual one, it also offers the easier way in. Following in the footsteps of Daniel Mornet, over seventy years ago, it surveys afresh the new sentiment de la nature that arose in the later 18th century. Because this preceded the major movement that has come to be identified as Romanticism, it has tended to be seen as a mere prelude to ...”

“... telescopes, the Hubble sees only slightly better. As recounted in this volume by Robert Smith, design of the space telescope was the subject of feverish politicking by rival groups of astronomers, since different light receptors best served the interests of those studying stars and those scanning the planets. The verdict on the design is not yet ...”

“... oak to regenerate satisfactorily below closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the ...”

“... to London. What do they want, these Brexiteers? The fantasies of hardliners such as Liam Fox, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are based on dimly learned lessons from British history. The mantra of ‘Global Britain’ resurrects an ideal of laissez-faire from the era of Manchester cotton mills and New World slavery. Discussing the range of Brexit ...”

“... 1973 Arber’s discovery did not look like one that could be put to practical use. In that year Daniel Nathans, a biologist in Baltimore, wanted to find out which of the genes carried by a tumour virus actually made tumours grow. He happened to work in the same laboratory as Hamilton Smith, who had succeeded in isolating ...”

“... University, a lecturer in English literature, a British national who took the code-name ‘Smith’. The most interesting is ‘Michaela’, who worked in a state art-dealer’s and reported for years on subordinates, acquaintances, friends, even her daughter’s boyfriend – out of a residual belief in the system, because she felt it her duty, as a ...”

“... selectively, finding value in Locke on government, or praising the free market philosophy of Adam Smith. Those were the days (to paraphrase Todd Gitlin) when the right got the White House and the left got the English departments, where the Enlightenment was seen as quaint at best and as the source of Western claims to superiority at worst. The battles of the ...”

“... well-earned, each valid, each full of spirit. Here’s Crawford on the Victorian poet Alexander Smith: Smith’s Edinburgh is a wonderful museum of itself; his Glasgow, a working industrial city. This contrast perceived by a poet of both places was true to the self-image of each … Glasgow was very much a site of the ...”

“... The subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet central casting could not have produced a more perfect foil for the American imperial Presidency than Ellsberg. An infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with genuine battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a defence intellectual employed by the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, with the highest security clearances, Ellsberg is as good as the American system can produce in the way of a male citizen working in the foreign policy apparatus ...”

“... through our having the wrong thoughts. Human cogitative failure is a many-splendoured beast, which Daniel Kahneman has devoted his life to studying. Some goofs prove popular enough to put paid to any very sanguine view of evolutionary cognitive ascent. Humans are dab hands at some tasks, such as acquiring language and matching patterns. But we suck at ...”

“... with your mum and dad in Essex. I bought a Bible, obviously – a Good News Bible, from W.H. Smith in Romford, the only bookshop I’d ever been to. I had no idea there were such things as bookshops that just sold books and not also, say, a full range of stationery items and cards for all occasions. My Good News Bible was translated from the original ...”

“... And she conjures too their solid husbands and husbands-to-be: the Bluebeardish Nigel, the curate Daniel, the Northern patriarch Bill. She can imagine sadism, both male and female. She writes both temper and quickness and the prison of placidity, which cannot move at the crucial moment. Pepper and ginger and golden milk. A burst of energy and song. ‘I ...”