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“... women since 1919, but in a series of ignominious wrangles it managed to fail to elect a woman for more than twenty years. In the end, J.B.S. Haldane, writing in the Daily Worker, had to stoop – ironically – to the argument that if they could offer fellowships to Indians, surely they could not ‘exclude women indefinitely’. The women themselves have ...”

“... In​ 1841 Thomas Carlyle declared that ‘the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.’ Soon after, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a policymaker in British India as well as a historian, wrote that ‘a people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants ...”

“... him in both marriage and religion, converting to Christianity. The play was immensely popular for more than a century after its first recorded performance in 1621. But after falling out of the repertory in the mid-18th century, it languished in critical and theatrical oblivion for more than 250 years. Since ...”

“... be and must be made a turning-point, but one which from many points of view, as Hynes remarks, was more a running-down; it was a dead spot at the centre of the war, corresponding to an ‘imaginative vacuum’ on the part of writers, a feeling that war simply paralysed the imagination and could not be written about. The Armistice, argues Hynes, was not such a ...”

“... called Holofernes; but instead of the decapitation his name appears to promise, he suffers nothing more traumatic than having his amateur pageant jeered by its aristocratic audience. The play is characterised not by courtly intrigue but by courtly love: DUMAINE: ‘Do not call it sin in me That I am forsworn for thee, Thou for whom great Jove would swear Juno ...”

“... III and his queen consort, Charlotte, did in 1761. Underneath her robes, Charlotte wore something more singular: her stomacher – the triangular panel covering the opening of the bodice – was encrusted with diamonds and valued at £60,000, the equivalent of more than £9.8 million today. At least it was recycled ...”

“... always the same ground, appeared from big publishers within a month of each other. Each contains more than a hundred and twenty poets, and both, while aware of picking from a changing landscape, expect (for a time at least) to be definitive. Their editors are themselves well-known poets who leave their own work out. Luckily, and as if to exemplify the way ...”

“... But things have changed dramatically since then, and since the – in retrospect – even more innocent time of the publication of White Teeth (2000). Looking back on her earlier novels in a speech she gave in Berlin in 2016, included here under the title ‘On Optimism and Despair’, Smith notes that people often ask her whether she has lost her ...”

“... inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went further: ‘The state of Africa, as I have described it, is exactly such as we should expect in a country where the capture of men was considered as a more advantageous employment than agriculture or ...”

“... Similarly, we would not call ‘literary’ a piece of writing which was not somehow portable, more capable than a shout of ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre of being transported from one context to another and interpreted differently each time. In this sense, literary discourse is what it is by virtue of never being quite identical with itself. But the ...”

“... military waste-paper basket of 100 AD. The originals can be seen at the British Museum. Bowman and Thomas provide the first and the final publication. Their book does more than decipher the faded and broken scrawl (difficult enough in itself): it provides, with enviable erudition, the whole necessary ...”

“... was like nothing that had gone before it. The wings of the Tupolev-designed plane had a span of more than sixty metres, the same as a Boeing 747’s. It was driven by eight massive engines, generating between them 7000 horsepower. Its 11 cabins, connected by telephone lines and pneumatic tubes, housed a cinema, a photographic studio and a printing press, to ...”

“... we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted ...”

“... book collectors. Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money). The book’s value was due not only to its extreme scarcity but to its central role in that most celebrated of literary love ...”

“... Thomas Edison invented himself, and then he invented the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite ...”