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“... In Vienna’s small world I had no idea that scientists of the calibre of J.D. Bernal, W.L. Bragg, David Keilin and Dorothy Hodgkin existed: how then could I have even tried to emulate them? It was Cambridge that made me, not Vienna. The longest chapter in Medawar’s book concerns scientific life and manners. I like his admonition not to regard manual work as ...”

“... reconstructs sexual norms from the actions – and the fates – of a few hundred deviants, David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch base their generalisations about the Tuscans and their families on one magnificent document, the Florentine property tax of 1427, which was based on a house-to-house survey of about a quarter of a million people. A typical ...”

“... In fact, I believe that few of Barbara’s colleagues, in any wing of the party, would have held that view. She shows herself to be very jealous of Shirley Williams, and in particular of Shirley’s success with the media, by whom she always felt herself battered. One can understand her resentment of the fact that of the two nicest people in ...”

“... image is trapped inside the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use ...”

“... contemporary power with glamour and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre ...”

“... least in her marriage to the very dashing, wonderfully intelligent, but ultimately incompetent, David Child. He, too, struggled to overcome a modest background through intellectual and, in his case, political and financial, achievement. Unlike her, he failed. And for six years in the middle of their fifty-year-long, childless marriage, when her career was ...”

“... of sex (see innumerable campus novels and many of the works of the postwar American writers whom David Foster Wallace derided as ‘the Great Male Narcissists’). On the page, though, the resulting hybrid is anything but ungainly, and in any case the narrator is out ahead of both types of reader, pointing to Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, a touchstone both for ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... historians, like Strasser, and others by literary critics. In 1996, a graduate student conference held at Harvard bore the uncompromising and prescient title ‘Dirt’, a rubric that encompassed topics from waste management to immigration to pornography. A forthcoming essay collection edited by Ryan Johnson and William Cohen will be entitled Filth. The ...”

“... involved in Boswell’s undertaking, but what about the degree of invention? It was very much held against Boswell, in the last century but one, that the Johnson he made was very different from the Johnson who lived, and the feeling remains strong among some people that Boswell simply made his hero up. This can’t be true: Edmund Burke remarked that ...”

“... of Roman water did, a vast and clever system that harnessed rivers and used canals and pipes. For David Sedlak, who divides the past, present and future of water into four ages, this was the beginning of Water 1.0, when the Roman model – sewers to remove dirty water and clean pipes to supply it – was copied in European cities. Drinking-water treatment is ...”

“... Anthony Eden may have described Nasser as ‘that Hitler on the Nile’, but after the 1978 Camp David Accords the country became a pillar of American interests in the Middle East and – by its withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict – an unwitting enabler of the expansionism of the Zionist state. Above all, Tunisia and Egypt were the last places in ...”

“... helps to have a dad who was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many ...”

“... their belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population under occupation. David Shulman, a distinguished academic, peace activist and a member of Ta’ayush, an organisation of Israeli Palestinians and Jews promoting coexistence, wrote about the hilltop youth in his recent book Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and ...”

“... man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician ...”