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“... should not be taken to suggest any idea of shortness. Fludd’s writings, said Anthony à Wood, sounding rather daunted, ‘were great, many and mystical’. His magnum opus was the Utriusque Cosmi Historia, which offered nothing less than a ‘technical, physical and metaphysical history of the macrocosm and the microcosm’. This appeared in parts ...”

“... with Willard Libby’s demonstration around 1950 that uncontaminated organic materials, notably wood, were testable for loss of radioactivity and, thus tested, could provide approximately accurate dates for the previously undatable. It seems not too much to say that this discovery produced a revolution in African archaeology where manifestly ancient but ...”

“... correspondence generated by her unfavourable review of The Official Foodie Handbook in 1985, Christopher Driver made pointed reference to her ‘perpetually forthcoming’ review of his own work. The postcards that punctuate the book, each one the occasion for an excursion by Clapp into biography or reminiscence, are also sometimes laconic, even for ...”

“... descriptions, the corrector sounds like some combination of child genius, automaton and loyal dog. Christopher Plantin praised his son-in-law’s potential for correcting because he has never been passionately interested in anything so much as the study of the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac and Arabic tongues (in which those who confer with him ...”

“... wrote seven novels. He wasn’t satisfied with the first few. The one he likes least, In a Yellow Wood (1947), was written when he was briefly an editor at a New York publishing house, and is about a man presented with a choice between the office and life. He thinks his authorial voice didn’t properly appear until The Judgment of Paris (1952), a tale of an ...”

“... its shuttered finish. This was painstaking: ‘Air bubbles which naturally cling to the rough wood texture needed to be knocked loose by vibrating the wet concrete mechanically after it was poured but before it set, but not too vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the ...”

“... of England from Elizabeth’s reign to the outbreak of the Civil War. Its thesis often echoes Christopher Hill’s work on Puritanism and the more recent suggestions of Keith Wrightson, but Hunt finds a voice of his own. His concern is with ‘social puritanism’: with the ‘interpenetration’ of the ‘material and ideological causes’ of the Puritan ...”

“... lies drowned at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story in Specimen Days, ‘In the Machine’, set at the height of New York’s industrial revolution, a young boy called ...”

“... His arrival at Harvard brought on homesickness and haemorrhoids. He roomed for three years with Christopher Lasch, later the social historian who wrote The Culture of Narcissism (of which Updike was arguably an exemplar; certainly many of his characters were, particularly Harry Angstrom). Begley quotes Lasch’s letters home about his roommate: ‘None of ...”

“... and political. Shortly after the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote to the king, saying that ‘there ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... he is sighted in London in May 1612, giving evidence in a lawsuit involving his former landlord Christopher Mountjoy, and again in March 1613 when he signed the mortgage deed on a property in the Blackfriars.* The two performances in 1613 bring Cardenio close to the Shakespeare-Fletcher Henry VIII, which was first performed at the Globe in June 1613. It was ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which ...”

“... rare visit to London during the war, for ‘something to go with my reptiliary – a seal pond – Christopher, wouldn’t it be fun?’ If Heathcote is fazed by the thought of further escaped inmates from my uncle’s neglected zoo, he doesn’t show it. The swans glide by; he climbs out of the mud; and looking, if possible, wilder than before, joins me on ...”