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“... His idyll was brought to a thunderous halt by his father’s death, struck down by a cricket ball. Cranborne, for his part, was a Cecil. His grandfather, Lord Salisbury, had, while prime minister, made his son Jim (Cranborne’s father) a minister – a piece of nepotism no other family would have contemplated. Cranborne was a lazy, hopeless student at ...”

“... and, on the sideline, stood a four-year-old boy and his mother. The child picked up a rugby ball and disappeared to a neighbouring pitch. When he returned, his mother asked: ‘Did you play rugby?’ The boy nodded. She followed this up with the enquiry that was entirely natural to her. ‘Did you win?’ Rugby Union is not the most democratic of ...”

“... scientist’ as ‘romantic neurology’, but in the foreword to Synaesthesia, Simon Baron-Cohen says: this book will do much to educate the general public about the important but often overlooked point that we do not all experience this universe in the same way. For the most part, synaesthetes would not wish to be free of the synaesthesia ...”

“... a famous diagram of this ether as a vast array of spinning gears separated by long strings of ball-bearings, a bit like Charles Babbage’s newfangled calculating engine on show in the College museum next door. He showed that the equations of such a complex array, suitably adjusted, were exactly the same as those of electromagnetism, and even managed to ...”

“... my arm signal even if he can’t hear my voice.’ Once, when a player asked whether a pitch was a ball or a strike, he replied: ‘It ain’t nothing until I call it.’ On another occasion, he was shown a photograph that proved he had mistakenly called a player out. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said to the press, ‘he was out because I said he was out.’Klem died ...”

“... Brought up Jewish and soccer-loving in the Netherlands, Simon Kuper has come to realise that he accepted too easily the myth of Dutch wartime heroism. The result is a long litany of hurt feelings, awkwardly transposed onto the world of soccer. He starts with a snapshot of interwar football, when international encounters were still few and English players enjoyed such unquestioned primacy that one German soccer writer referred to them as ‘a sort of Übermenschen ...”

“... Yorker in 1957, shy, dreamy Art Longwood climbs a tree on a family picnic to retrieve his son’s ball – and carries on climbing: Up and up Art Longwood swarmed and shinned, And the leaves said yes to the questioning wind. What tiaras of gardens! What torrents of light! How accessible ether! How easy flight! His family circled the tree all day. Pauline ...”

“... were Radio 1 car stickers on Ford Sierras. There were conservatories being added to the strains of Simon Bates’s mid-morning show. There were big and tidy back gardens, on hot Saturdays, ringing with the amplified chuckle of Dave Lee Travis. I was 12 or 13. I’d stay in the car when my parents went to the garden centre, trying to get a better reception on ...”

“... have lost, but invoked ever since, with the help of patriotic clips showing Botham launching the ball out of the ground, to try and take our minds off the fact that England have now lost to Australia in seven Ashes series on the trot. During future unsuccessful series, the producers will at least have Butcher’s innings to go with Botham’s. One very ...”

“... explained that the real problem was Botham’s bowling. Botham took a wicket with his first ball, another the next over, another soon after that. Then he scored an astonishing 59 not out in 32 balls. Before long, he was having a row with Somerset County Cricket Club Committee, which sacked his two friends Richards and Garner. The row seemed to inspire ...”

“... of the Colorado state line. James Craig Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, and Simon Newcomb, from the Naval Observatory in Washington, were among those hoping to catch a first definitive glimpse of Vulcan, though others had other purposes: Thomas Edison wanted to test one of his inventions, an infrared measuring device he called a ...”

“... the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ‘trivial, snobbish, shallow and profoundly lacking in judgment’, a toady to the rich and royal, and, according to Nancy ...”

“... Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their Götterdämmerung. Simon Heffer gives a useful account of the ‘long and damaging fall from the pedestal’ in the first chapter of his 1995 Life of Carlyle. The extent of that fall can also be gauged in the acres of cheap Victorian editions still to be found in secondhand ...”

“... demons of social class that money incubates, comes into Grace’s life-story at every turn, and Simon Rae’s new biography does well to start by recording that, where one of his grandfathers had been a butler, one of his sons became an admiral. This was a family promotion that turned on his own hugely newsworthy command of a game which, as it grew in scope ...”

“... thought polite. When he passed, Chávez, instinctive politician that he is, at once flicked the ball on to the feet of the Hand of God. (He originally wanted to be a baseball player. Football is not his game.) What was important was that his largesse had secured the Copa for his country, thereby strengthening his popular appeal at home, enhancing his ...”