“... in belly dancing. Most scandalous of all was his debut back in Leningrad in Don Quixote on 27 May 1960. As the audience waited for the curtain to go up on the last act, Nureyev was in his dressing-room refusing to go on. The problem was the ‘lampshade’ pants he was obliged to wear. He wanted to appear in tights alone, as Western dancers did. His ...”

“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... taxes to welfare Clinton governed ‘not just to the right of Jimmy Carter, but to the right of Richard Nixon’. Against Clinton’s declaration that the era of big government is over, Krugman calls for ‘an unabashedly liberal programme of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality – a new New Deal’. There are indeed some Democrats, most ...”

“... rightly points out, even if exoplanets turn out to be exponentially plentiful in our galaxy, life may prove to be an even more exponentially improbable occurrence. The easy leap made in the early days of SETI – from stars to planets to life to intelligent life – was never more than a conjecture. So the ‘eerie silence’ – no confirmed SETI contacts ...”

“... 1940 and 1945 he turned away from nationalism and xenophobia – life in Nazi-occupied Paris may have prompted him to think again. Primer of Passions, written in Romanian during the war and published in French much later as Bréviaire des vaincus (1993), resonates with disappointment. Bidding farewell to his native country and welcoming exile and ...”

“... or cowardice in the faces opposite them. Tube poetry between the world wars, from F.S. Flint and Richard Aldington to Eliot and Auden, is a monument to triteness. None of these writers took the trouble to grasp the experience of underground travel in its specificity, as Hitchcock did, as Gissing and James had done. They rendered it as an unvarying condition ...”

“... cruise was led by an American whose identity is redacted, but the editor, Larry Siems, thinks it may have been the navy reservist Richard Zuley, identified in court documents as the Special Projects Team chief for Slahi’s interrogations at Guantánamo, a retired Chicago cop now working for the aviation police at O’Hare ...”

“... the history of British India with the story of the Lows and their immediate kith and kin. Readers may sigh at the author’s promise of an ‘epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery’. Mount has written some historical fiction: in Jem (and Sam) he invented a 17th-century forebear, Jeremiah Mount, who rivalled Pepys as a diarist, and he has Wolf-Halled ...”

“... in 1883 of an English translation – a project fronted by the Orientalising self-promoter Richard Burton – there have been a great number of illustrated versions. To many, the Kāmasūtra’s connection with India is almost incidental. Most do not know what the text as a whole is like: the best-known portions take up only one of its seven ...”

“... final few weeks and his death, ‘this difficult, tedious, painful enterprise’. That May, Noseworthy had called Gunn from Palm Springs – where he was living with his new boyfriend, the porn star Richard Locke – and told him he had Kaposi’s sarcoma. A few days later, he arrived in San Francisco to get ...”

“... about the forensic relevance of bones, speaks to the difficulty of assessing how old a bone may be (as she says, ‘setting up a murder investigation based on Roman remains is not likely to result in a solved case’). The speed with which the flesh of a corpse melts from the bone varies greatly depending on temperature, soil type and scavenger ...”

“... they went through 1400 metres of coral before hitting a basalt base.While recent threats to reefs may make them seem fragile, they have existed for most of the past 500 million years. There are gaps in the geological record where ocean chemistry and climate didn’t favour reef growth, but isolated corals have always survived, allowing reefs to return. And ...”

“... editor-presenter of the arts’ he rates the accolade of his own Spitting Image. Lynn Barber may have famously delineated his ‘awful smug matey blokiness’ in the pages of the Independent on Sunday, but perhaps that only demonstrates what an inviting target Bragg has become. As a character in Kingdom come (1980) explains, ‘the rules are simple ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... in the spring of 1975 there was little left of the old society. Cambodia had become Kampuchea and Richard Nixon had given birth to Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge Communists sealed their borders and withdrew into isolation. The cities were forcibly evacuated and the people were sent back to the land – not to the villages from which they had come, but to new ...”