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“... hay-meadows, musical with skylarks and linnets, the chalk downs halcyon with milk-wort and bell-flowers; 97 per cent of meadow-land has gone since the war; 150,000 miles of hedgerow at 11,000 miles a year; 200,000 farms; 880,000 jobs (more than three-quarters of the total). In the past quarter-century, three-quarters of the song thrushes have gone and ...”

“... So the majority are actresses (Elsie and Leigh), academics (Cam and Darbishire), artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera ...”

“... The enclosure in front of me also has a pool, and a bridge spanning a hoop of tunnel. At 2 p.m., a bell rings. The shed doors open and a gang of Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus), easily identifiable by the pale crescents splashed across the dark fur of their chests, bundles out into the steamy April sunshine. Muzzles flickering aloft, they scent ...”

“... the popular version of Scottish history that once flourished in pubs and school playgrounds, Henry Bell invented steam navigation when the Comet began its regular voyages between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”

“... huge close-up colour photographs of exhausted marines. Set an amateur snapshot by Vanessa Bell, a glamour portrait by David Bailey, and a picture of a nurse in uniform from Belle View Studio in Bradford against one another. One aim the curators had when they settled on this melange – a multi-layered picture of the ...”

“... on both sides of the Atlantic. Dressed in a carefully chosen series of gowns – by Deirdre David’s report, the wardrobe consisted of black or red velvet for the tragedies, white or pastel satin for the comedies, and dark green or blue brocade for the history plays – and with no props other than a large reading desk, some piled-up books and a pair ...”

“... David Bohm and Basil Hiley worked together for twenty years and between them developed a very unusual approach to quantum theory. Bohm died in 1992, but by then the book was almost complete. It is a magnificent monument to one of this century’s finest and most attractive minds. Painfully shy, and finding few fellow physicists willing to give a hearing to his new ideas, Bohm struggled for four decades to get beyond the orthodox views that he had himself defended in his Quantum Theory of 1951, long the subject’s standard textbook, but which later put him in mind of Escher’s Waterfall, whose careful construction cannot hide the fact that the water must at some stage be flowing uphill ...”

“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... high boredom threshold. Indisputably the greatest game ever written for the BBC was Elite, by David Braben and Ian Bell. The aim was to travel through eight galaxies, each with 32 solar systems, trading cargo, battling enemies and becoming a steadily more feared space pirate. Not only were you able to save your progress ...”

“... stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described as madness – as one of the few active means of keeping society alive ... Cooper: Yes, I think we’ve ...”

“... affairs secretary, and Bernard Ingham, her press officer, and a handful of personal familiars like David Wolfson and Tim Bell, it is hard to think of a single Cabinet politician, perhaps excepting the ever-supplicant Joseph, who did not eventually find themselves, after a period in the sun, banished into the half-light: the ...”

“... David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten (1999), which describes itself as ‘a novel in nine parts’, is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. The protagonist of one will have a walk-on role in the next; a minor character from someone else’s story will later reappear as the narrator of their own. The first narrator is a member of a Japanese doomsday cult, the perpetrator of a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, now on the run in Okinawa ...”

“... images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th century. As David Trotter notes in Cinema and Modernism,* his account of the impact of film on Woolf, Joyce and Eliot, critics have tended to associate modernist literature with montage, a term used by Russian film-makers of the 1920s to indicate a quick succession of ...”