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“... double are Henry Moore and Sir Ronald Syme. Nothing could be more interesting than to learn such a man’s views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Greenham Common women, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and the fitness of women for Holy Orders, but Todd had no intention of writing any such book: his resolution was to ‘place on record an account of my own ...”

“... and brother-in-law of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the current overall leader of the movement. A big man with a permanent infant-like smile, he crouched cross-legged behind a low table, sifting through documents. A Kalashnikov rested against the wall next to him. He opened a plastic shopping bag, pulled out a thick pile of papers and started throwing them on the ...”

“... seem to me to become more and more windy, verbose and meaningless. Personally, I think him a man of weak character and great vanity, and I do not trust him.’ And how he feels about Murry seems to spill over into his view of Mansfield, who is all the more suspect because Murry slyly promotes her work. Scofield Thayer, in a letter to Eliot, is perhaps ...”

“... in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths surround the man, among enthusiasts, cultists and close readers, and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry ...”

“... for present-day feminist historians credit that should really go to pioneering historians such as Ray Strachey, J.A. and O. Banks and Constance Rover, who publicised the link between suffragism and sexuality well before the advent of women’s liberation. And neither Kent nor Walkowitz (much advertised here) breaks new ground in recognising the feminist ...”

“... by E.S. Goodrich, who was (like M.D. Hill, one of his science masters at Eton) a disciple of Edwin Ray Lankester and a believer in natural selection at a time when other modes of evolution seemed to many equally, if not more, persuasive (saltationism, for example, which held evolutionary changes to be abrupt, or neo-Lamarckism, the idea that an organism’s ...”

“... includes a far lower order of men than Chemist, Physicist or Mathematician. You don’t call a man a Mathematician, deserving of his country’s reward, because he has spent his life getting as far as quadratics; but every fool who can make a bad species and worse genera is a “Naturalist”.’ And another biologist, Richard Owen, made light of herbarium ...”

“... and a rejuvenated public sphere, he still felt ‘the curious, hostile glances of fans who see a man elbowing his way towards the stadium as they are pouring out after the last whistle’. Ascherson’s homecoming in 1975 coincided with that of another ‘red Scot’, Tom Nairn, whose own journeys, intellectual and geographical, are now surveyed in ...”

“... Inquisition prohibited it in 1620 and actively prosecuted its use. ‘Hast thou eaten the flesh of man? Hast thou eaten the peyotl? Do you suck the blood of others?’ a 17th-century catechism read. But its use survived where the cactus grew in northern Mexico and where semi-nomadic groups evaded conquest. In 1890, the Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz ...”

“... the same time they designated human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness and the work of man as the continuity of the desert, culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.’ Or, later, ‘the whole of America is a desert. Culture exists there in a wild state; it sacrifices all intellect, all aesthetics in a process of literal ...”

“... those paintings but me.’ The Irwin of the late Seventies whom Weschler describes is a contented man. Yet at that point his work seemed to have come to a dead end. He had run the line of the argument he was following until there was literally nothing to be done – no work to make. He was very happy, he said, to do nothing. It was partly a Californian ...”

“... Mussolini had a Jewish minister of finance in 1933. ‘Our Mediterranean culture,’ claimed the man from CasaPound, ‘was always a melting pot of diverse cultures.’ But for Pound, the Mediterranean was not so inclusive. Its culture was ‘untouched by the two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindu disease’. Only between these diseases was there ...”

“... twice a week, but those letters remain unpublished; they might convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting one.) And now James Booth, who teaches English at Hull, and has already written two books on the poet (Philip Larkin: Writer, 1992, and Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 2005), has composed a brief for the defence ...”

“... as the duodenum, the bit of the small intestine just downstream of the stomach. By the 1910s, X-ray technology was making a vital contribution to visualising the stomach and its lesions. Surgical access to the organs of the abdomen in the 19th century was slow in developing, partly because of problems with anaesthesia and infection, and partly because ...”

“... Darn again! Practice makes perfect. Most fiction about tampering with history (since at least Ray Bradbury’s story ‘A Sound of Thunder’, published in 1952) places a lot of emphasis on unintended consequences. Chaos theory as popular culture imagines it, in The Butterfly Effect or the Back to the Future films, is more concerned with spiralling ...”