“... when it’s just going to sit there. She is both concerned for the imprisoned turtle and unmoved by its authenticity. The museum has been advertising these turtles as wonders, curiosities, marvels – among the plastic models, here is the life that Darwin saw. It is Thanksgiving weekend. The queue is long, the crowd frozen in place. I begin to talk with some ...”

“... course, a bankrupt butcher in Wagga Wagga, originally called Arthur Orton though at the time going by the name of Tomas Castro, slyly admitted that he was indeed Roger Tichborne, who would by now have been a baronet and the owner of the large Tichborne estate in Hampshire. And on Christmas Day 1866 he arrived in London to ...”

“... in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families. I grew up in Long Beach, but by 1968 had moved to the city. My parents, however, still lived there, and my outspoken mother arranged to see the city manager, a non-partisan administrator who exercised the authority normally enjoyed by an elected ...”

“... sway over scientific debate. Marine fossils found in the stones of the pyramids could no longer be explained away as remnants of the Flood; they were monuments of geological time that extended far beyond the records of ancient civilisations. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, thought that the Earth had been formed from the debris ...”

“... of it really work?A sceptic could, of course, try to find out, through scientific experiment or by studying the deceptions of magicians, healers and witches. You might even try stepping into the sorcerer’s shoes, pantomiming their arts and seeing what happens. But there is a risk: what if, by play-acting as a ...”

“... only God can know the truth about the truth, most people assume that what we don’t know could be known by somebody looking hard and skilfully enough at the problem. I’m not sure if in the 21st century there is quantitively more in the world that isn’t known, but certainly we know that there is more we don’t ...”

“... Vampires seem to be making a comeback these days, and not just at night and from the grave. In broad daylight you see sleek sets of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels everywhere, and the first of no doubt many movies based on the series opened at the end of last year.* But vampires haven’t really been away. From Dracula to Buffy they have sustained an extraordinary attendance record among human communities, have never stopped being almost everyone’s favourite form of the undead ...”

“... Museum (until 25 July). First, paper was expensive and vellum more so. The drawings tend to be small and nothing is wasted – variations or new subjects are often found on the other side of the sheet or in unoccupied corners. Second, painters kept hold of drawings so that an unfamiliar thing, a cheetah say, or a difficult one, such as a gesturing ...”

“... Once​ upon a time there was a place called Europe. All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés played Johann Strauss waltzes all the time. Everyone was analysed by Freud, but it didn’t make any difference ...”

“... counterpart. After all the adulation given to Richter in recent years, there was bound to be a swing in the direction of Polke; this impressive show is that swing. If Rauschenberg and Johns prepared the way for Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Polke and Richter quickly adapted American Pop, which they first encountered in magazines, to German ...”

“... to shoplifting pork and beef: ‘College was supposed to straighten me/like a bent tree strangled by a wire,/but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.’ She had a special line in bad or stinky sex: a teen defloration felt like ‘trying to cram a washrag/down a bottle neck … In the end the inside of me/was not wiped ...”

“... Wilder concentrate on the delirium, which he definitely wasn’t going to let go. It wouldn’t be a screwball comedy if it didn’t depend on loose screws, on faith and fragile logic rather than reliable engineering. Even the date, about twenty years too late to keep company with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in ...”

“... Excitement was aroused by the announcement, last September, of a double discovery: the actual rules, on a cuneiform tablet, of a board game thought to date from 3300 BC, of which only some surviving boards had previously been known, and a living individual from a Jewish community in Cochin who had herself played that very game before she migrated to Israel, and could recall the rules in accordance with which she had then played it ...”

“... When you draw up a list of famous frogs in the history of the planet, it turns out to be pretty short. There’s the one who was only doing time as a frog, and there’s the one who was nothing more than a small felt glove puppet who went into show-business and hobnobbed with a lot of celebrities in the Seventies ...”

“... revolutions, it is also about the past. There is a half-remembered sense of a past which has to be restored: a more glorious time which must have preceded the arrival of the occupying invaders, a past when the people had their own sovereignty, their own dignity, their own freedom to make mistakes. The very name ‘Sandinista’, from Augusto Sandino who in ...”