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“... and informative. Trained to think in terms of the physics of gyroscopes, pulleys, pumps, calf’s-foot jelly or rubber bands, they extended this behaviour to Creation. Their critics, like the waspish French scientist Pierre Duhem, thought this mechanical obsession was a typically British weakness: ‘we thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered ...”

“... Auchinleck’s Scotland, for all the David Humes and Adam Smiths and Hugh Blairs, still had one foot in times when family feuds were settled by the spear and the firing of houses. To the old taunt, Boswell’s guts responded in the old way. Meanwhile Boswell went on wrestling vainly with his own choices in life. He wanted to be a Member of Parliament, but ...”

“... editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ignorance has ...”

“... of a folk-tale’: immediately speaking, that of another Jean – ‘Jean-de-trop’ (‘John too much’) whose father, seeking a godparent for his latest child, accepts Death in that role; more generally, a masked version of the widely-told tale of Godfather Death, well-known to folkorists the world over. Le Roy Ladurie is well aware that such ...”

“... than a gentleman (one of his favourite distinctions), a competent professional of modern spirit. John Kennedy was already dead, but the New Frontier spirit seemed to be alive in the Britain of 1964, and Harold Wilson to exemplify it. We believed him, or some of us did, when he said that he would get Britain going again, bring in new people, harness new ...”

“... flock of pigeons in Washington Square. He knows the birds by name: Big Bosom, Lady Astor, St John the Baptist, Polly Adler, Fiorello. He wanders from saloon to saloon cadging beers, sandwiches and cash. Most important, he adds to his work-in-progress, a mysterious book that he calls ‘The Oral History of Our Time’. This massive, encompassing volume, a ...”

“... The​ vast majority of those who worked in service never set foot in a stately home. The country house, with its uniformed staff and rigid hierarchy, looms large in the British imagination, but the experience of service in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was far more mundane and far more various. Most servant-keeping households employed only a cook and a maid or a single maid-of-all-work or ‘general ...”

“... them) lining the grand staircase. A naked baby appears as a symbol of contemporary art: at the foot of the stairs, a photographer (George Platt Lynes) zaps the scribbling infant with flashbulbs; on the balcony labelled ‘Museum of Modern Art’, the baby plays hopscotch on a Mondrian, surrounded by Picassos; and at the top of the stairs, the Met’s ...”

“... beloved of today’s builders. During the Gezi protests, I noticed a teenager rubbing with his foot the meringue façade of a mall which covered what once had been a perfectly beautiful hundred-year-old building. He kicked it and some of the white stuff broke off, like dried icing sugar from a gingerbread house. What is Erdogan doing? It’s easy to hate ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...”

“... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...”

“... gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind ...”

“... and physical ties on the other. Or the Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that ...”

“... means ‘spleen’), and a group of trainee doctors in white smocks. Examining the chart at the foot of my bed, Milza would ask me: ‘And how is our Englishman today?’ Questions designed to gauge my mental alertness met with little success. In English I was asked: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ I was in two minds about that. ‘I fell – or else I ...”