“... an investigation. ‘As a result of Professor Dean’s comments,’ he explained, ‘there now may be students on our campus who feel threatened in or outside of the classroom.’ An email, with the subject line ‘Invitation to Participate in Investigation’, has been sent to Hobart and William Smith students by a law firm retained by the college ‘to ...”

“... in nine years, falling from 2.2 births per woman in 1987 to 1.3 in 1996. A demographer somewhere may prove me wrong, but I believe this to be the fastest collapse in peacetime fertility in recorded history (less rapid, but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but ...”

“... Michel Foucault, for once and for now, may stand aside: who is the Raymond Roussel about whom he wrote this, his one real essay into literature? Roussel was a writer, of sorts, of the early 20th century; a man both glamorously rich and mentally odd. His money he spent to the hilt in the furtherance of his oddness, for Roussel laboured to write the most uncommercial works and then paid to have them published ...”

“... right hand, the triumphalist tone returns in the final pages of The American Century: Reagan may have presided over the largest peacetime expansion of the military budget in American history and then imagined that the Soviets and Americans could unite behind his Star Wars Strategic Defence Initiative ‘to repel invaders of Earth from other ...”

“... stone of mathematical understanding – and therefore of science itself – was laid. Thales may have been the first to introduce this notion of proof, but it seems to have been the Pythagoreans who first made important use of it to establish things that were not otherwise obvious. Pythagoras also appeared to have a strong vision of the importance of ...”

“... two disasters: a husband dead from a brain haemorrhage and a daughter dead from an overdose. Mrs A may have taken the altruism route to restore some sense and meaning to her life. That is a story fit for Sharp’s book, even if she does not do living donors. Sensational tales notwithstanding, the day-to-day work of organ procurement is mundane and ...”

“... prosecution does not intend to rely in presenting its case in court. This ‘unused material’ may well be evidence which could assist a defendant in proving his innocence. It might be a statement taken from someone at the scene of a crime which, in contradiction to another eyewitness, asserts that a defendant was not present, or a report by a forensic ...”

“... not to betray him to his mother’. The vastly successful and productive middle-aged Picasso may be a subject for awe; he does not invite compassion. Richardson’s previous two volumes, taking Picasso to the age of 35, were more naturally engaging. The artist had to rise. He had to put behind him his hopeless father (‘an execrable ...”

“... once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz, and tell where it may still be found.The precise nature of the family dynamics that shaped Larkin’s jaundiced views on marriage and parenthood have prompted much speculation. His own most explicit attempt to link his ‘natural fouled-up’-ness to his early childhood ...”

“... my teenage son – and I too have tweeted an image that links me to Hannah Arendt. In Aberdeen in May 1974, Arendt had her picture taken along with her great friend Mary McCarthy less than a mile away from where I would have been sitting at that very moment in school. What on earth were those two doing in Scotland? Well, Arendt had been delivering the second ...”

“... the staff association for England and Wales, told the BBC in 2014, shortly after Theresa May, the then home secretary, laid into the organisation at its annual conference (the police aren’t allowed to have a union and have been banned from striking since 1919). ‘We were the favoured group, always looked on by government as the people who did ...”

“... a drawing of myself (‘Cheers!’). The temporarily denominated pub is called the Crossed Pipes.4 May. A review by Elaine Showalter of a biography of the photographer Richard Avedon in which I am mentioned as one of his sitters. Sitting it was too, and in acute discomfort, as Avedon chose to pose me perched on the branch of a tree in Hyde Park, one leg on ...”

“... worse; if we go on as we are, the scientists warned, our planet’s near-to-medium-term outlook may well be grim.Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC work ...”

“... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...”

“... and French painting (meaning the line from Corot to Matisse, from Sardanapalus to Ma Jolie) may be seen as events of equal weight. Both, taken as a whole – the simple fact of them, their coming into being, their import, their purpose – are mysteries. Both speak to a fundamental change in the conditions of representation in the cultures that gave ...”