“... the seedlings. Delivery was complicated owing to ‘the bulk [that] arises from the bellows’, as John Tyndall, the Institution’s professor of natural philosophy, explained.In such peaceful pursuits, surrounded by his family and struggling, though less than in some years, with the mysterious illnesses that had dogged him for decades, Darwin conformed to the ...”

“... its contributors Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them ...”

“... tied up a barge a little too smartly in Alfred Docks and damaged a stanchion; some rudder gear took a knock a week later, but this was attributed to the actions of a passing trawler, and in any case both accidents happened during the war. A mine once detonated against the starboard quarter of the Aysgarth, Les’s regular command, but you could argue that ...”

“... cynical politicians who don’t see support of ‘queer theory and semiotics in the poetry of John Clare’ as a big vote-winner with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room ...”

“... DVD). No, they didn’t use melons for the knife-slashing sounds, but beef, which the sound man took home and roasted after the shoot. There was, Skerry insists several times, a hazy shot of Leigh’s or a body double’s nipple behind the shower curtain, and of the knife tip entering flesh, which both Leigh and Hitchcock denied. And Saul Bass merely ...”

“... be said to have exceeded its ends: first in the rhetorical and stylistic games of patterning that took over the writing of the time, and second in the fact that many graduates could find no employment. The 1590s, plague-struck and famine-ridden, saw university-trained men moving faute de mieux into the new London theatres, underpaid but not (most of ...”

“... like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other sunk into the pastor’s. The Christians’ version of Muhammad was violent and ...”

“... Gesina; Rembrandt had Saskia and Hendrickje; and at least one prominent Vermeer scholar, John Michael Montias, has speculated that several of the unknown women in Vermeer’s paintings are the artist’s wife or daughter. Perhaps the order of things was a bit more bourgeois in 17th-century Holland: though biographical data for the Dutch are ...”

“... importance of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during ...”

“... for Equatorial Guinea, including ‘a shell company owned by Obiang in the Bahamas, whose account took deposits in suitcases of cash in plastic-wrapped bundles’. Staff at the bank hadn’t bothered to read the 2001 IMF reports that detailed missing revenues in their client’s country or to comply with money-laundering laws by establishing the origins of ...”

“... support for the divorce. But Pole delayed showing his hand in any public way, and early in 1532 took himself out of the national debate and returned to Italy. This was the beginning of 23 years of exile, during which time a high-powered ecclesiastical career almost propelled him to the papacy. But in the mid-1530s his situation was delicately poised. Henry ...”

“... maintaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken (too) seriously’. According to John Lindow’s ‘unnatural history’ of trolls, the original trolls of Scandinavian folklore punished improper behaviour and upheld social norms. If you take the behavioural code of lulz seriously and erase any commitment to social norms, what you are left ...”

“... Mary Patterson, married Lewis Sheridan Leary in 1858. The following year, Leary was recruited by John Brown for his suicidal raid on Harpers Ferry, and the bullet-riddled shawl that was eventually returned to Mary was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next ...”

“... mi,á clàbar criadha tiugh:Air carraig chòmhnaird chuir mo chos;mo cheuman shocruich e.He took me from a fearful pit,And from the miry clay,And on a rock He set my feet,Establishing my way.Late one evening last summer, I crossed the moor alone, picking my way between the pools and the peat hags. It’s not easy land. It just takes one bad step – a ...”

“... the new US ambassador to the Vatican had been ratified by the Senate. He could easily, if the mood took him, find a willing camera somewhere in front of St Peter’s and call on the Church to keep its nose out of American politics, to concentrate instead on cleaning up its own doctrinal house. It wasn’t hard to imagine Vance, in that week, as Trump’s ...”