“... believed – as most did – that all species had been created by the Almighty. The Jesuit Père David, who explored China in the 1860s, was propelled by his quest for God’s wonders, and careless of personal hardship. Exploration was by no means confined to rainforests. Conniff is particularly good on the early history of species ‘bagging’ in North ...”

“... Hope (2000) preceded her next big one, Behindlings (2002); Clear (2004), a furious defence of David Blaine’s 44-day exhibition of hunger artistry at Tower Bridge, interrupted the composition of Darkmans (2007); and Burley Cross Postbox Theft was conceived and delivered during the writing of The Yips, out soon, which seems likely to continue the ...”

“... though in a grisly illustration of the importance of freedom of choice in America, prisoners may still opt for the chair.) With typical fridge brilliance, Kinney claims it’s precisely our ignorance of the historical role of hooding that prevents people from protesting against modern day executions: ‘It concentrates all accountability in the ...”

“... orders. A subway worker told the New York Times that he felt more sacrificial than essential.On 25 May, at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, Floyd asphyxiated while being pressed into the road under the weight of law enforcement. His dying was watched by passers-by and recorded on mobile phones. Those of us who weren’t present are secondary ...”

“... from February to November 1533; de Selve, whose mission, if any, is obscure, from about March to May.Behind the two personages and the table between them is a heavy green curtain, and they and the table are standing on a floor elegantly coloured and patterned in squares and circles enclosed in a continuous decorative band; it looks like a mosaic but has none ...”

“... However, the strain of her inflexible attitude, with its insistence that her way is the only way, may well be telling. Sometimes the mind blots out reality and compensates by believing only what it wants to. Perhaps it was not just a wilful desire to misinform that led Mrs Thatcher to insist, in a confrontation with myself on Nationwide in ...”

“... location, probably in one of the many compounds owned by the Egyptian armed forces. At the end of May, Joe Biden announced a framework for an agreement on what he described as an ‘Israeli ceasefire proposal’, which was immediately rejected by Israel. According to the plan, a ceasefire would be declared and Israeli forces would begin to withdraw from ...”

“... to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freud’s American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first ...”

“... I suppose a cork-lined carriage. The ‘Marcel Proust’ might be a good name for a train. 16 May. Philip Roth’s face in a photograph by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt. 30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people knows how to restore or ...”

“... patronage of a king proclaim a writer at ease with his own educational capital and the position it may earn him. As it turned out, Love’s Labour’s Lost was a landmark in Shakespeare’s accession to prosperity and prestige. It appears to have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after ...”

“... in Map Five. The map of Israel’s ‘Final status’ proposals for the West Bank put forward in May 2000 are shown in Map Six. All maps were provided by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Washington.]On 29 September, the day after Ariel Sharon, guarded by about a thousand Israeli police and soldiers strode into Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (the ‘Noble ...”

“... nothing about them, because we learn almost nothing about Richards either. This glazed reticence may, however, tell us something in itself, especially if it is viewed as part and parcel of the public persona of the man in the middle of the Modern Movement. At this point, let me lay my own credentials on the table, since what follows stems in part from my own ...”

“... to be taken seriously and relying on a single performance by Jo Grimond, Jeremy Thorpe or David Steel to give them whatever credibility they could earn. It was Labour that faced the real problem. Defeat for the leadership – often following a bitter row – saddled it with policies unacceptable to its own MPs and profoundly unattractive to the ...”

“... feel the same way about going to bed with handsome men, although a dishy premature ejaculator may find that women shun him. He certainly has a low opinion of the feminist sexual imagination. He applauds the way women abandoned brassières in the late Sixties, and believes that for some of the women who did so it was ‘part of the realisation that ...”

“... of confrontation which he has used against the British printing unions in the Wapping dispute may hark back to his 19th-century predecessor as proprietor of the Times, but they were perfected in the US management-union wars of the 1970s, which were quite unarguably won by the managements. Equally clearly, the British unions had not learnt the lessons. All ...”