“... between genes and a vast number of environmental variables. Moreover, philosophers from John Locke to Derek Parfit and John Perry have rightly insisted on the importance of the continuity of psychological states – experiences, memories, desires and intentions – to personal identity. Cloning raises deep ...”

“... of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ...”

“... had hair like this –with the interesting exception of Jerusalem’s Clara Maugham from Up North and uncertain class status, whose hair we never find out about. My hair was fine and mousy and fluffy and frizzy. You could do something about it, as I did, by ironing it (really, with an iron in those pre-straightener days) every morning between 1963 and ...”

“... in war was connected with suffering in love. Even doctors played up the metaphors. The physician John Sintelaer wrote a long treatise on venereal disease called The Scourge of Venus and Mercury (1709), in which he discussed the case of a ‘certain great Officer in the Army’ who ‘had receiv’d a very deep Wound in the Wars of Venus’, and counselled ...”

“... Wisconsin with a population of around eight thousand. The state capital, Madison, is 34 miles north-west and Milwaukee about 60 miles away, east-northeast. Jonathan Williams, of Jargon Press, visited Niedecker in 1962, a year before her second marriage to Albert Millen and subsequent move to Milwaukee: Miss Niedecker, I guess in her fifties by now, lives ...”

“... ended in disaster, when his camp was ambushed. One of his three companions was killed; another, John Hanning Speke, was badly wounded; Burton himself was pierced through the cheek with a javelin. Undaunted, he set off the following year to find the ‘Great Lakes’ of eastern central Africa in which he believed the river began. Travelling in blackface was ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... the delegation, was a geologist famous for pointing out that England was slowly tilting into the North Sea. The novelist and translator Rex Warner had been a left-winger in his youth but was now a comfortably-off, convivial figure. Sir Hugh Casson, who had directed the architecture of the Festival of Britain, was lively-minded, self-critical and immune to ...”

“... by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. He was at the end of his contract with Universal, who were either not taken with the subject or disappointed by Hitchcock’s projected style for the film, so he produced it with his own company, Shamley, and filmed it at the Universal lot. In ...”

“... to convey his condemnation of Charles’s beheading. For the Royalists, Muhammad was Cromwell; John Milton and other Parliamentarians responded by equating Charles with the prophet. Those who idolised the king as a martyr had ‘stolen the pattern from Mecha’, Milton wrote. Muhammad had been an all-purpose heresiarch, but now he devolved in the European ...”

“... full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court. Such determination, veering at times into wilfulness, continued undiminished until her death, 64 years later. By then she was Empress of India, and thanks to the carefully planned marriages of her ...”

“... works well, not least because the background is in itself a subject of considerable interest. The North Country of the later 18th century was not, in any limited sense, provincial. If anything, its remoteness from the capital seems to have encouraged intellectual independence and a willingness to experiment among people like the Loshes who took ideas ...”

“... leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to have been killed by Maoists in 1945) and Southern whites alienated by the federal government’s role in eliminating Jim Crow. All of them pegged their hopes on the Arizona Republican senator Barry ...”

“... counterparts slip away. Hepworth called theirs ‘a movement in flight’. By 1939 she had left North London, and the Isokon building on Lawn Road, once blisteringly white and standing for all that was new in architecture and living, was painted brown to elude the Luftwaffe. The moment had passed. But in the year of the hole, Hepworth and Nicholson (who ...”

“... especially in its literary/dramatic forms, has been a story of kings.) With the exception of King John and Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s English history plays have survived not as one series but two. The first works its way from Henry VI to Richard III. The second turns back into the past to cover the prequel reigns from Richard II to Henry V. It is hard to ...”