“... not monopolise the scene. In the 1740s the gout wars were heavily overshadowed by the pamphlets of Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher-quack who urged the use of tar water, internally or externally, for everything from gout in gentlemen to glanders in horses, from taedium vitae in scholars to the vapours in women and stupidity in infants; as a healing cordial it ...”

“... of fate. In Britain, ‘The Tragic Mistake’ seems to have begun its life in the troubled days of James I and is often appended to accounts of the capture and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh after his return from the Orinoco in 1618. More than three hundred years later in Germany, a related tale was told about a soldier returning home in the desperate days ...”

“... sour because it looks as though she will have to support her family by teaching the daughters of a bishop, but most would have shared her depression at the prospect. The efforts of the governess were exploited and undervalued. She was denied the privileges that supposedly brightened a lady’s life, and could not earn enough to allow for anything but the ...”

“... His influence reverberates through a class of indie rappers and producers – Earl Sweatshirt, Bishop Nehru, Tierra Whack – who work outside the big label system. Doom was a desperado, a dastardly fellow, a self-proclaimed ‘bastard’ who rapped with an incredible urgency and a laconic lilt. He could sound like an album of Mitch Hedberg one-liners ...”

“... was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he ...”

“... and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had a more complete architectural education – in Rome – than any of his British contemporaries. He was a Catholic, and his career suffered because of it, but through his buildings at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the churches of St ...”

“... Over the course of the next few moves, Carlsen managed to bring his rook, knight and dark-square bishop into the attack. He advanced a pawn close to Caruana’s king, kept his own king out of danger, and had an extra half hour on the clock. It wasn’t a clear win for Carlsen, but he was certainly ahead. Rumours then began to circulate that Carlsen had ...”

“... but it’s become less plausible to rank Duncan’s work with that of Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop or the Roberts Lowell and Creeley, all of whom were born within a decade of him. I don’t imagine that even his most enthusiastic supporters would put his influence anywhere near that of John Ashbery, who seems pretty securely the major American poet of ...”

“... forgotten world of English Presbyterianism. I discover he has a second cousin who is a Catholic bishop, and that they’re often mistaken for each other. Then we divert to teaching, teachers, nicknames from schooldays – the Bubble, the Coot, Bungalow (not much upstairs), Davey Doom as the boys called my headtcacher father. I tell the story about the ...”

“... Yeats answered the latter: Whether they knew or not, Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard’s eye. But Yeats was in trouble here, and showed he knew it by making these lines the ...”

“... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...”

“... demographic by broadcasting a more liberal and Euro-emollient message. In target seats like Bishop Auckland in County Durham the two big value clans they most need to convince – BMG calls them ‘Strength and Respect’ and ‘Proud and Patriotic State’ – are made up of older, whiter, predominantly working-class Leavers apparently moved by the ...”

“... Creation. Significantly, Borges’s essay was focused on the mid-17th-century programme of Bishop John Wilkins for a universal language capable of accurately registering each and every occupant of the world, a scheme Wilkins developed at least in part to help his calculations of the original contents of Noah’s Ark. Debates about the Flood and its ...”

“... and history. In the 1870s the subjects might have grown up as a single faculty at Oxford had not Bishop Stubbs, the Regius Professor of History, vetoed the proposal. When Oxford gave social respectability to Eng. Lit. by founding the English School in the 1890s, the syllabus required undergraduates to demonstrate a historical knowledge and to relate ...”

“... and Ancestors (1982), The Politics of Evolution (1989) and, most successfully, Darwin (1991, with James Moore). Desmond’s literary technique has itself undergone evolution and, with his last two works, is now perfectly adapted to his purposes. Biography (currently the best-paid and best-selling of genres) is Desmond’s preferred form despite the fact that ...”