“... crawling on our bellies a thousand feet below ground and we saw how the poor buggers lived. It took a lot of tea to get the dust out of our throats. The filming was good. We were all just first-timers doing our thing. He had such an analytical brain – I don’t want to say un-English, but he was persistent. As well as all that he had such a suave ability ...”

“... Why, in the great majority of animals, are there equal numbers of males and females? For John Arbuthnot, writing in 1710, it was evidence of the beneficence of God: ‘for by this means it is provided, that the species may never fail, nor perish, since every male may have its female, and of a proportionable age.’ But while that might do for man, it will hardly do for those many species in which there is no monogamous pair bond and no parental care, and in which one male can fertilise many females, and yet which have an equal sex ratio ...”

“... that won their release after a couple of weeks. Voronel got his visa at the end of 1974, and Azbel took over the leadership of the seminar. Many other refusenik scientists were able to leave Russia during the next two years, but not Mark Azbel. Agitation on his behalf was kept up in Britain, although we never had the organisational effectiveness to match the ...”

“... to the eldest son and heir? Not a bit: it seems to have come as quite a relief to her, although it took her some time to produce children of her own. She fitted as snugly in Emily’s bosom as did everyone else. Of course Emily was resented by some. Edward FitzGerald, the poet of Omar Khayyam, clearly could not stand her, but he was probably jealous of her ...”

“... had called him in to GosPlan in 1991 for a secret consultation on this thing called the market: he took Sachs to the GosPlan council chamber and spent an entire day, together with the largely silent ranks of his senior colleagues, questioning and listening to him. At the end of the day, Sachs said he would send a fax with a few of his thoughts on market ...”

“... might have herself planned the poisoning of a prominent courtier was unthinkable.’ So Forman took the blame, and at the trial and afterwards was vilified as a necromancer and charlatan. This will not do at all. In the 15th century it was absolutely normal for women of the high aristocracy to be accused of murdering personal or political enemies by ...”

“... At the start​ of the war, John Piper – who had made his name as an avatar of high abstraction in the mode of Braque and Mondrian, his paintings hanging among the Giacomettis and Calders in the seminal 1936 show Abstract and Concrete – was struggling to get by. His pictures weren’t really selling, and he was living on the £3 10s a week he still got from his mother ...”

“... eat. How many of us who know that milk is pasteurised have also heard of the ingenious Irishman, John Tyndall, who in the 1870s discovered that mother bacteria are destroyed by heating food or milk, but that their offspring survive? These sturdy youngsters have had their powers of resistance much reduced, however, so that they succumb to an ensuing bout of ...”

“... the phrases of the Anglican liturgy function as patent jargon. With entertaining animus, he also took a stick to the near and would-be professions, arguing that the lexicons of the established professions (‘defrocking’, ‘disbarring’, ‘striking off’, ‘cashiering’) deserved more respect than those of the aspirant professions (from academia to ...”

“... moral outlook, a rejection of traditional religious beliefs. Quite incongruously, Fitz’s poem took off in this company, its epicureanism given a new look by Eastern colours which also give the poem a daring, even sexy quality, the hint of a new sort of voluptuousness behind the veils, moons and roses. In the traditional rubai that Omar and others were ...”

“... involved with him for fear of censorship on moral or political grounds. One future bishop called John Personne, the author of Strindbergian Literature and Immorality among Schoolchildren, blamed Strindberg for masturbation among the young. The Bonniers’ business suffered from publishing him and the subsequent rejections fed Strindberg’s ...”

“... different style. I’d never heard anything like it,’ Count Basie said. In time he employed her. John Hammond, the pioneering record producer who ‘discovered’ Holiday, said: she ‘changed my musical tastes and my music life’; she ‘sang like an improvising jazz genius’. ‘I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn. I try to ...”

“... early inspirations to ‘a willowy Wren’ who ‘recognised the bracken where we stood ... and took “argute” on trust’. It is Larkin bracken, and also points towards those tall fronds on the heath near Bockhampton where Hardy as a child sat and pondered his intellectual future. But as well as these English inspirations – Cambridge, Barnsley, the ...”

“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and ...”

“... 2012, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester put on an exhibition of works by the painters Gwen John and Celia Paul. What now seems obvious was then inspired. The comparison diminished neither. Two artists, distinct but in obvious affinity, spoke across their different periods and each made the other more necessary, more triumphant. It was as though ...”