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“... of the Exchequer was inevitable: but the government decision against this project in 1968 took a surprisingly painful toll in disillusioned nuclear physicists. This long-drawn-out conflict not only pushed the science policy machine into a permanently defensive posture against Treasury economisers: it also demolished the notion of a united front for ...”

“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as ...”

“... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...”

“... appears to have pervaded Getty’s personal life. After a paternity suit had had to be settled, he took to requiring women he went to bed with to sign a release just before the event. Each divorce seemed to bring a meaner and more humiliating squabble over money. He tended to ignore the four sons produced by his marriages; when he did notice them, it was ...”

“... of distracting teaching and administrative chores? Again, the Provost of University College London took a lead by circulating to his heads of department a letter instructing that colleagues who had not been helpful in the 1992 exercise might be given more teaching, reassigned to such tasks as fire officer and, in incorrigible cases, have it hinted to them that ...”

“... that mentioned revolt or longing for a lost fatherland (such as Bellini’s Norma): but they took place in 1847-48, just ahead of the 1848 revolutions, not in 1842-43. So far was Verdi in those earlier years from chafing under the ‘Austrian yoke’ that he dedicated the scores of Nabucco and I Lombardi to two Austrian archduchesses in turn, one of them ...”

“... French literature, the 11th-century poem of ‘La Vie de Saint Alexis’ is the story of a man who took his first step on the road to sainthood by deserting his wife on their wedding-night. (In a properly frosty chapter on the Surrealist cult of Sade in the 1930s, Carolyn Dean comes within three italic characters of making the volume’s one joke, when she has ...”

“... their deaths were worse than others. American news media, he remarks sardonically, only sat up and took notice when the disease started to strike the people who mattered – heterosexuals. But in fact the American news media had been ignoring large numbers of heterosexuals affected by Aids. It was just that these heterosexuals happened to be Africans, not ...”

“... once been “Chettwynde”, which meant “the winding path” in Anglo-Saxon; and the suggestion took root in my head that poetry, my name and the road were, all three, mysteriously connected.’ Writing about travel and distant places often gains its force from the mixture of motives on the part of the traveller, the blend of self-extinction and ...”

“... of the Modern movement was beyond anybody’s control. The problems of how and why its suppression took place may or may not get analysed in a sequel. But at least it is left ...”

“... Sartre, a superior being slumming in the ranks, he gives hints of their complicity in the role he took on their behalf. ‘Hey Sartre you’re a philosopher, do you think I should ...’ a soldier asks, as if the obsessively independent thinker had finally been allotted a pastoral responsibility in the barrack-room. But Sartre the philosophical clown is a ...”

“... to complete what were expected to be the formalities. It was not Kitchener’s fault that these took another two years, as the Boers fell back very successfully on guerrilla tactics. But his method of combating these tactics, by a massive network of blockhouses dividing up the veldt into numbered squares, and the infamous system of ‘concentration ...”

“... respect for institutions and persons that have no right to respect.’ This determined disrespect took the form of explicit mockery of those who would censor him. ‘Look here, Low,’ says Beaverbrook in 1927, ‘your cartoons are giving great offence to my friends. I must ask you to reconsider your view of Lord Birkenhead, Mr Churchill and the ...”

“... have occurred to him was to note for us the shape of a stain on his breeches or how his mistress took her skirt off to go to bed. Coleridge liked to jot such things down, and Coleridge, like a modern writer, must privately have thought that everything about him must be fascinating to any reader. The new mimesis is thus really a question of the writer ...”

“... afford both to compete and to do its public duty. So it bought property, it built studios, it took on more and more staff, it flourished – and it grew. Soon it was the largest broadcasting organisation in the world. There was scarcely an aspect of television or radio production for which it did not itself accept responsbility. At one end of the process ...”