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“... a billion people in the 20th century alone – and blinded and disfigured many more. It was, as Thomas Macaulay said, ‘the most terrible of all the ministers of death’, and its preferred targets were children. In the past, you may have had something like a one in three chance of getting the disease and, if you did get it, a one in five chance of ...”

“... and life flourished.The second evolutionary leap was made, as Lovelock sees it, in 1712, with Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the atmospheric engine. In itself, this modest apparatus doesn’t suggest the dawn of a new era: a small fire heats water, driving steam into a cylinder; the steam is then quickly condensed, creating a partial vacuum that allows ...”

“... survey of Restoration music. Music, be it noted, not just musical life: Luckett is a valuable new brand of commentator on Pepys who realises that the diary contains within itself the foundations of substantive history rather than simply gossip. Here there is an excellent discussion of the use of tablature as against staff notation, and the ways in which this ...”

“... and broken. He wanted to make everything glow and be great, and following Whitman, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe and Fitzgerald, he may be the last of the traditional American literary frontiersmen, opening the Republic up to itself, and romancing the earth. Kerouac’s greatest childhood friend and hero was Sebastian Sampas. Ann Charters, in a nicely ...”

“... Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain rose,’ Merrill wrote years later in his memoir A ...”

“... work had been recognised more pragmatically on the frontier itself, where in 1764 the explorer Thomas Morris, venturing into what is now Illinois, discovered to his surprise not only that he was not the first anglophone to have got so far west but that the locals already knew exactly how much the crown jewels of his culture were worth: ‘An Indian ...”

“... committee of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as one of its early supporters; joined the board of the brand new Newport Jazz Festival; was a founding member of the National Council on the Arts, which created the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts; helped create American public educational television; served on the board of ...”

“... different razze, and by those, like the Prince of Ruoti, who decided to change the design of their brand, forcing everyone to update their manuals.Did razza beget race? The contribution of Renaissance breeders is ambiguous at best. More concerned with practicalities, European breeders weren’t great theorists. Breeders and trainers disagreed about whether ...”

“... designer Paul Poiret, who pioneered trousers for women; Avant-Dernières Pensées at the Galerie Thomas, which was run by Poiret’s sister. Among the glitterati, Satie was introduced to Cocteau, with whom he had an immediate rapport. They started working together on a ballet based on the sideshow acts at a fairground: conjurors, acrobats, dancing ...”

“... Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of ...”

“... for Baroque, this is followed by ‘The Apparition of Gongora’, the man who invented the Spanish brand of bubbling champagne called El Barroco, a heady wine of a style which, according to Borges, carries its own parody within. But Padilla never parodies anybody’s style, not even his own. In ‘Relief, where Every time a generation comes in or goes ...”

“... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the ...”

“... failing schools into being taken over by a stronger trust. He also made provision for ‘brand-new schools set up by charities, universities, business, community or faith groups, teachers and groups of parents’, which he snappily called free schools. Legally, the structure of academies and free schools is identical: a charitable company limited by ...”

“... and Sainsbury’s stocks tiny bottles of a red palm and rapeseed blend made by a health-food brand called Carotino. But that’s it.The oil palm grew in the floodplains and swamps of Africa millions of years before the existence of humans. Excavations in the Bosumpra Cave in Ghana show that people have been consuming some version of its oil for five ...”

“... 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 sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this ...”