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“... bonds intricately woven into the text not simply of The Lyre of Orpheus but of the entire trilogy. Simon Darcourt’s biography of Francis Cornish, for example, was begun early in The Rebel Angels and is completed at approximately the same time as the opera. Cornish was Arthur’s uncle and eponym of the Foundation – a man who had gathered great wealth and ...”

“... actions would, if unchecked, infect the whole land with error. Hoccleve and his contemporary, John Lydgate, occupy a pivotal position in Strohm’s account. His careful contextualisation of their writing shows how concerned poems like Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, finished in 1411, and Lydgate’s Troy Book, composed during Henry V’s reign, were to ...”

“... is an escalating disaster, on a scale that amounts to an existential threat to the NHS. As Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, says, ‘obesity is the new smoking.’ The culprit or culprits are easy to find: diet and inactivity. And within diet, especially, sugar. If you look for the changes in our diet in recent decades, this is the big ...”

“... but genuinely induces narcolepsy. You fade in and out of consciousness until he stops talking. Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem candidate in 2004, might this time have had a chance to be mayor of London, but I don’t think Paddick does. The funny thing is that while Labour is desperate not to lose the mayoral election – because it would be such a terrible ...”

“... as gatekeeper for the commercial publisher, keeping his corridors clear of unwanted petitioners. Simon and Schuster (motto: ‘there’s no such thing as a good book that doesn’t sell’) offer the following typical disincentive to intending authors: All unsolicited manuscripts will be returned. Only manuscripts submitted by agents or recommended to us by ...”

“... by the US health insurance provider Kaiser Permanente in 1953. President Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explained to his boss the basic concept before the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser ...”

“... at Jealousy’ would ideally encompass both the Metaphysical language of Richard Crashaw or John Donne and the invective of a Cockney. The versions by Elaine Feinstein do not convey the rhymes or Tsvetaeva’s rich verbal texture, but they read very well. With irresistible candour, Feinstein explains in the introduction to A Captive Lion what it was ...”

“... himself isn’t like that: he’s much more feline. The actor who catches this side of him is Simon McBurney in The Loudest Voice in the Room, the dramatisation of Gabriel Sherman’s book about Fox News. The Loudest Voice is the best depiction to date of how systematised, institutionalised sexual harassment works (and is recommended even to, or perhaps ...”

“... It doesn’t take much to make John Humphrys angry. On the basis of his most recent book, Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (Hodder, £7.99), it would seem that there isn’t much that makes him angrier than bad language. Not swearing – he likes swearing – but bad use of language ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... rather than to far-flung travel, that ‘Chinese’ in the title refers. The haunted narrator, Simon, tells us a story which is exotic or romantic only in his head, but is intriguingly so there. Daydreams and hallucinations unsettlingly alternate with sharp noticings. In a seeming paradox he ‘reads the thoughts’ of a fellow passenger on the Tube as ...”

“... removal of quotation-marks from these hitherto contentious or puzzling terms. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer are historians of ‘science’ who were led by their discontent with the hegemony of experimentation to study the controversy between Robert Boyle, patron saint or founding shaman of the experimental method, and his most profound and systematic ...”

“... some portraits – reproduced in full colour – that had been done of Strachey; there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s birth); there’s one by Henry Lamb, painted in 1914; there’s one by Dora Carrington from 1916. In Meade’s book, I was most struck by the following passage about a party in Los Angeles. (Parker, in ...”

“... between priests and laymen on jurisdiction over the other world. When the Civil War came, John Aubrey recalled, ‘Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition’ arrived too, and ‘the phantoms vanished.’ In characteristically utilitarian fashion, the Society for Psychical Research set about classifying apparitions in terms of whether a ghost ...”

“... 1581, and then a number of letters – business letters, essentially – to his half-brother Sir John Gilbert about privateering, shipping and local matters. There is nothing about the Virginia (Roanoke) Plantation, his rise at Court in the 1580s, or his intellectual activities. Only in his correspondence with Sir Robert Cecil in the 1590s do the letters ...”