“... chemical nature of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s ...”

“... always the right’ ones), giving its character to his paradoxical modernism. When he read The Waste Land in the mid-1920s, the line ‘C.i.f. London: documents at sight’ was as a stone dropped down a well, echoing with riverside workshops, bills of lading, sight-drafts, brokerage, bonded goods and harbour dues. The odd relatives and elders who ...”

“... brotherhood was a Chaucerian addition to Boccaccio’s original Theseid and it is hard not to read into it a reference to the kissing knights of Constantinople. Clanvowe and Neville were close enough to Chaucer to witness a document releasing the poet from liabilities in a mysterious rape charge of 1380. And in his high-minded Boke of Cupide God of ...”

“... compassionate man and an incomparable friend. I first met him late in Michaelmas term 1957. I had read history at Exeter College and in Final Schools the previous term rather to my own surprise (and very much to the surprise of my college) had just scraped into the first class. So instead of being thrust out into the world as I had expected I was offered the ...”

“... Davinder became Dave, Baljit Trevor. We learned Joyce Grenfell comic monologues off by heart, read short stories by Arthur Quiller-Couch – anything we thought would make us truly English. Not only would we laugh at malicious jokes – ‘Why do Pakis never play football? Because every time they get a corner they build a shop on it’ – but, eager to ...”

“... of a poor settler family – his own family – in Algeria. If Sartre and his circle had lived to read it, they might have forgiven Camus for brandishing his proletarian credentials in Paris. In La Peste, Rieux the doctor is a model of fortitude (a good novel with an irreproachable citizen at its centre; how hard is that to write?). But there is also an ...”

“... Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat and scarf to match with a grey fedora ...”

“... the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a performance: ‘We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... joined MI6 in 1941, he doubted that ‘there was one man [there] at that time, who had read Mein Kampf’. Indeed, Hitler’s rise to power made virtually no impression at all on the ‘defenders of the realm’, except as an opportunity to expand the franchise on anti-communist surveillance. To this end, officers of Special Branch – the ‘arms ...”

“... the cognoscenti for her reclusive style of life and the zen-like austerity of her vision. I first read about her in the 1970s in a weird stream-of-consciousness piece in the Village Voice by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston – herself once a fixture in the New York art world – described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find ...”

“... most obsessions, this one took a while to get going. In my twenties, as a literature student, I read and acquired the obvious classics: Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse, Brittain, Fussell. But I had lots of other fads and hobbies going too: opera, Baroque painting, Kurosawa films, the Titanic, the Romanovs, trashy lesbian novels. Sometimes my ...”

“... good to eat.’ Packets of biscuits were lying there and a giant heap of broccoli. Martin read out some of the labels: ‘Chicken and stuffing. Yorkshire pudding. Cashew nuts. Bananas. Three chicken pies. Yesterday.’ The lady in the claret hat came up to the door of the van to ask if we had any butter or bread. ‘Mince?’ asked ...”

“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”