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“... symbolic power, no more contain the history of the Sioux than they do that of the United States. Guy Gibbon is an archaeologist, but The Sioux is a synthesis of a broad range of scholarship. It is a thoughtful and earnest attempt to examine Sioux history from before contact with Europeans to the present day. The strength of ...”

“... that are soon to be extinct: The legless skink. Also the velvet scoter. The Hainan black crested gibbon. The angel shark. The rusty pipistrelle. The Stone Mountain fairy shrimp. The variable cuckoo bumblebee. The marbled gecko. The Alagoas tyrannulet. The thicklip pupfish. The hoary-throated spinetail. The white-chested white-eye. The Cozumel thrasher. The ...”

“... or two. But I was, finally, not his type. And though he was a remarkably handsome sweetheart of a guy, not to mention a Faber poet, he sure as hell wasn’t mine. So all of that got sorted out from the get-go, and Thom was wonderfully kind to the women in my life, one after the other, and all of them adored him. He was a bit like a dream uncle: rather ...”

“... to his 1863 book, Man’s Place in Nature, showed a sequence of skeletons running from the gibbon to the human via the orangutan, the chimpanzee and the gorilla, a sequence intended to emphasise man’s anatomical kinship with the primates. Darwin called it Huxley’s ‘monkey book’, and thereafter any chimp might have been proud to bear the name of ...”

“... how he wrote. The prose style he adopted – or which adopted him – owed something to his idol Gibbon but more to Carlyle (whose ideas he despised). Especially in reviews of other historians’ work, he could be pitilessly sarcastic, annihilating in his mockery. In his demolition of Arnold Toynbee, for example, Trevor-Roper accused the saintly old windbag ...”

“... through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small ...”