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“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”

“... freedom, against nature, against the hope of the world’. According to the historian E.A. Freeman, he was ‘the friend of the Turk and the enemy of the Christian … sacrificing the policy of England, the welfare of Europe … to Hebrew sentiment.’ Hurd and Young modify their argument at this point. Disraeli, they claim, ‘carried into foreign ...”

“... the ‘gunpowder plot’ and literary impostor (a category not yet extinct). In the latest volume John Stone-house appears as politician and confidence trickster, but Harold Philby is dubbed Soviet agent rather than traitor and Klaus Fuchs gets by as theoretical physicist. Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... of ice water, Feynman had visibly put his finger on the reason for the catastrophe. As his friend Freeman Dyson later remarked, ‘the public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.’ In a dissenting report, which witheringly ...”

“... first published in 1977. It is a sort of dinner party farce, except better. The aptly named Edward Freeman asks his friend Simpson and Simpson’s wife, Muriel, to spend the evening with him and his mistress, Binny, at Binny’s house. Binny, a divorced single mother, is ‘sick to death of being introduced only to those boozy male acquaintances of his who ...”

“... and maintained a modest cloth business. Winstanley served his seven-year term and became a London freeman. Then he struck out on his own, married and established a household in the city. He survived on the margins of the hyper-competitive cloth trade, buying and selling for small profits and improvidently granting unsecured loans to his ...”

“... He was cross when Bradford reciprocated the indifference, and delayed making its famous son a freeman of the city, but he was most masterful and most himself when away from his native dales. Not so Lewis, for whom the legacy of Protestant Ireland was probably the most significant thing in his imaginative life, more even than Norse mythology and the epic ...”

“... will enable new writing, new politics, unblemished by Irishness, but securely Irish.’ Opening John Kelly and Eric Domville’s scrupulous and magnificent edition of Yeats’s letters, I readied myself to take a sling-shot at the great Cuchulain – the impulse dissolved in helpless love, chortles, delight. The old boy, I realised, has managed here his ...”

“... Orage made him his assistant at the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female ...”

“... the camaraderie of the laboratory, for there is no experimental work. Which is why the career of John von Neumann, who did do new work, and is the nearest thing the book has to a hero, is not typical. When he wanted to build a computer at the Institute he met resistance: Harold Cherniss, a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, became an Institute ...”

“... Hugh Casson and David Astor. ‘Why haven’t you thrown them away?’ I asked my friend Catherine Freeman, the 87-year-old owner of the dusty folder I’ve been drawing from. ‘They will help me as I plan my own service,’ she said. I wondered if the challenge of throwing away these old booklets is a bit like the one of zapping the names of dead people from ...”

“... with gold embroidery and a ruff so large her head looks as if it were served up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville may have been intended to mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a ...”

“... to the text may not have been so different from that of an author like Jane Austen who, in John Bayley’s words, ‘set her characters going to see what they might do’, or Pushkin, who in the midst of composing Eugene Onegin wrote to a friend: ‘My Tatiana has gone off and got married. I never would have expected it of her.’ No doubt the drafters ...”

“... It is odd to think of Geoffrey Elton, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lewis Namier as one thinks of Edward Freeman, Samuel Gardner and Edward Gibbon, humanised and distanced at the same time. Vanity and virtue, foolishness and brilliance rub shoulders. One imagines one has heard it all before, but the cumulative effect cannot be denied. Kenyon obviously knows a great ...”