“... to have had a touch of Robin Hood about him, Honan does not dismiss the venerable legend that the young Shakespeare used to poach deer on the estates of local aristocrats. But for the most part Shakespeare: A Life is colourful only where the record strictly warrants it. Colouring in the record is what this book does best. Honan’s particular flair is for the ...”

“... were on average 14 per cent heavier than women’s. Broca’s data were elegantly picked apart by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Most of the difference is accounted for by differences in height and build between men and women, and once corrected for these, the gross difference evaporates. After Broca’s death – it turned out at his post-mortem ...”

“... the trappings of the hardened old warhorse you could still see traces of the impetuous young thoroughbred, who had enchanted Leiris and others a quarter of a century before.’ Well, yes. Most of us were easier to take when young, especially if we were beautiful, energetic, bright and eagerly ambitious, as Sonia ...”

“... might have to exercise more than hemispheric control became urgent during the Second World War, as Stephen Wertheim has recently shown in Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy. After the Fall of France, US war planners began to consider the implications of living in a world of protected economic zones, with Europe under Hitler’s control and ...”

“... and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a ...”

“... BCE – immediately after the conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, the aggressive and imperially expansive young king of Persia – the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had previously lived under the easy-going rule of Croesus the Lydian, and had received a sharp rebuff when they tried to get a similar deal from Cyrus, approached the Spartans for a protective alliance. The ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... cage of a new type that can be slipped between two combs in the brood chamber’) by a distressed young woman posing, rather pointlessly, as a local journalist. This fails to deceive Holmes for a moment – for has she not sent him a handwritten letter from a private address? – and the real occasion of her visit turns out to be anxiety over her ...”

“... alternative existences. By contrast, Jacobson’s wife is not named in the memoir: she is ‘the young woman’, another gesture, it seems to me, towards what Stephen Dedalus calls ‘the room of the infinite possibilities’ that events have ousted. Jacobson and his future wife later watch Miss Bunbury from their rented ...”

“... and drawn fighters from across Africa to join them. They have also recruited local youths, some as young as 14. Those rallying under the Islamist banner don’t necessarily share the same agenda. Some are cocaine traffickers seeking new partners and protection. Others hope to get a piece of the million-dollar ransoms collected from Europeans kidnapped in the ...”

“... by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense of the city itself with its diverse population of recent immigrants, foreign merchants, and its notable Jewish community. The young Becket was proud of his roots. An example ...”

“... When​ my grandfather died of a heart attack in 1927, he was the father of three young children and did not know that a fourth child, my mother, was on the way. This strangeness – the growth of a baby after the death of its parent – was both tragic and miraculous. It made my mother feel odd about her existence, I think, which is not the same as feeling odd about herself ...”

“... being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to ...”

“... of his favourites. It shows the top storeys of two houses with an upper porch and two figures, a young and an older woman. I don’t think there was really any idea of symbolism in the two figures. There might have been vaguely; certainly not obsessively so. I was more interested in the sunlight on buildings and on the figures than in any symbolism. Jo posed ...”

“... she had married a monk, not a king’. Louis had in fact been raised in a monastery. The cleric Stephen of Paris agreed that he ‘was entirely ecclesiastical in his conversation and habits’, though from him that was high praise.Louis’s monkish tendencies became all too apparent during the disastrous Second Crusade of 1147-49. Eleanor herself had taken ...”