“... Not because there’s a lack of material. Here’s Eric talking to another talk-show host, Charlie Rose: ‘Oxford had these long breaks so I could leave Oxford and I could go to work with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. I could go to Cambodia and work with kids who lost limbs to landmines. I could go to Albania … ’ Look him up in the New York ...”

“... to bring it up to the average among similar countries. Over the course of the 2010s that share rose in most countries, but in the UK it fell. In particular, the share of GDP spent on investment in healthcare (new hospitals, new beds etc), which in 2010 was around the average among ‘peer’ countries ...”

“... the case among humans speaks against multiregionalism, but in favour of a recent common ancestry. Chris Stringer of the National History Museum in London is the best-known exponent of the Noah’s Ark idea, which he argues for in African Exodus. The two competing views are thrown into sharp contrast by what happened in Europe, where modern humans replaced the ...”

“... by American operatives in orange boilersuits at an underground facility; he falls in love with Rose, the new Doctor’s main assistant, and comes to understand his predicament, squawking ‘I-am-a-lone!’ with a sorry droop of his suckered arm. It was touching and horrible and tremendously funny – a story like a piece of sculpture, to be admired from ...”

“... bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to write poetry in standard English and began experimenting with ...”

“... distinguished her from every other celebrity he had ever met. Most simply, however high her star rose, Monroe never let go of her roots. ‘I would have never thought that our ordinary lives would have interested someone like her but they did,’ Lena Pepitone, her personal maid in the last years of her life, said in Marilyn Monroe – Confidential, written ...”

“... Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the Jetty. At some stage in the submersion it must have become a tapering tongue, finally perhaps a mere stub. Smithson, an adventurous character (who was killed when flying a light aircraft to look at one of his works from above), might ...”

“... by Henry VIII in 1538, whereupon its five-acre precinct became a prime piece of Tudor real estate. Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess gives a remarkably detailed account of its residents in the 1590s, some of them very distinguished, and of their efforts to exclude one who would become more distinguished than any of them. Blackfriars is an area ...”

“... to legislation without the actuary’s approval.’ Watson does not appear in Bread for All, Chris Renwick’s synthetic history of the British welfare state. Instead Renwick tops and tails his book with the well-known figure of Sir William Beveridge, opening with a vignette of the great social reformer going to the Commons on 16 February 1943 to listen ...”

“... site was, on average, barely two metres above sea level, and four metres below the level the Haven rose to during the 2013 storm.I have to dwell for a bit on the weirdness of that last sentence. It has ‘sea level’ both as a constant and as a value that goes up and down all the time. Human life and property by the trillion dollarload hang on the millimetre ...”

“... uncertainty in the minds of both the public and his fellow boxers. To watch Prince Naseem or Chris Eubank today is to see a clumsy rehash of Ali in the early years, when he seemed so threatening, so unconstrained by the social rules willingly or unconsciously accepted by Liston or Patterson. The space in which imagination and conjecture could float ...”

“... cusped ogees led to spiralling steps; and indoors, springing from the leafy capitals of polygonal rose-coloured marble pillars, beautiful late gothic vaults closed over the Hall of the Knights. Has he really remembered those diapers, those cusped ogees – he doesn’t say he had a camera and a hundred rolls of film – or has he conjured the details on the ...”

“... Work of Alphonse Kauders’, an absurdist recitation pitched somewhere between Roberto Bolaño and Chris Morris, was dreamed up for radio in 1988) but later addressing his displaced existence. The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002) made him something more than a name to watch, and since then he’s had his share of American goodies – big-name ...”

“... diaries to be published and promised that they would be ‘frank’. The world’s press rose to the bait, expecting another instalment of Hollywood-Babylon: ‘Private Lives of Stars Laid Bare in Diaries,’ the Telegraph forecast. Prudently, Isherwood had destroyed the journals that would have interested posterity most: the record of his life ...”

“... over the perfect naked body of a reclining 16-year-old male model, blowing playfully at the rose petals that barely cover his genitals while he tries to retrieve the petals and keep his bits concealed. ‘They’re all disappearing to Earls Court down there,’ she says, pecking tenderly at his neck and cheeks. ‘So’s your hand,’ he ...”