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“... First World War. In his essay on ‘Mortality Crises and Epidemic Disease in England 1485-1610’, Paul Slack attempts to assess the frequency and causes of years of high mortality. His data are from parish registers, which recorded baptisms, marriages and burials, and from wills, which give some indication of deaths in the years before 1538 when the ...”

“... pursued ideas of material progress, or ‘improvement’. In The Invention of Improvement (2015), Paul Slack interestingly showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to ...”

“... as the words of the musician Thomas Whythorne during the outbreak of 1563 (quoted by the historian Paul Slack in his still unsurpassed 1985 study, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England): ‘I looked every minute of an hour when I should be visited as the rest were. I doubting the worst … did now gather so many comfortable places of the ...”

“... Seventy-four years ago a viral pandemic began in America, most likely on a pig farm in Iowa. Fifteen months later it had killed over eighteen million people, 1 per cent of the world’s population, as many as died in two world wars, almost ten times as many as have died in a decade of Aids. The virus, transmitted by airborne mucus and saliva, spread via coughs and sneezes ...”

“... The first of these is Mr McCrindle, who phones the company to complain that his new fence has gone slack: ‘As Mr McCrindle had demonstrated by his phone call, the main concern of farmers was that their fences should be tight. Without this the restraint of beasts was impossible.’ After McCrindle’s fence has been tightened, the company boss Donald sends ...”

“... best bookstore-café, there’s a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller ...”

“... One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the Crown, a testament to the uneasy. Forster-like imperial conscience of a pre-Thatcherite age. In foreign affairs, Mrs Thatcher’s experience was slight ... This is masterly. The introduction of ...”

“... committed to renationalising the railways. Naturally, therefore, the bidding for the companies was slack. Porterbrook, the first in line, was bought very cheaply by a group of British Rail managers led by a not very remarkable man called Sandy Anderson, who invested £120,000 in the venture. Later in 1996, the Labour Party changed its tune and effectively ...”

“... ruins everything. Far too often, Frank Keating introduces his characters with two (or even three) slack adjectives. On one page we meet a ‘strong and handsome’ Simon O’Donnell, a ‘snarling, aggressive, straight-backed’ Geoff Lawson, a ‘swift hostile Craig McDermott’, a ‘wicked old Jeff Thomson’, a ‘gritty, youthful Doug Walters’ and a ...”

“... Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley and their colleagues are from the North, and they are poets: but they are individual poets, not a school. They are not even two rival schools, though some of them have started fabricating a split, presumably in the hope ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of 1898 ...”

“... kits. At one point it seemed as though the entire West Coast genomics community was on the same Slack workspace (I counted more than a thousand users from sixty companies and ninety universities). In the race to conquer Covid-19, barriers between scientists, government and business leaders seemed to make no odds, and – even more surprising – academics ...”

“... having raised the siege of Belrepeire, finds its inhabitants gripped by famine. They have slack skin, ashen complexions and sunken bellies. Parzival knows what must be done to avoid the frenzied scenes which would otherwise ensue now food is again available: ‘Faultless Parzival proceeded as follows. He first shared out the victuals neatly himself ...”

“... not they are genuine, they are his own inventions. His fellow soldiers suffer in similar fashion. Paul, the NCO, says to Sartre, ‘Me, a soldier? I consider myself a civilian in military disguise’ – which is to trespass on Sartre’s own proud self-definition. Paul comes under the lash: ‘That would be all very fine ...”

“... army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite; it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; its forms of life ...”