“... if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets on the Moon as well as on the Earth reduced the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit bit by bit over the centuries, causing the Moon to approach the Earth and reducing its ...”

“... Revolution or its principles, and the feeling was mirrored on the other side of the ocean. John Adams told James Madison in 1798 that ‘there was not a single principle the same in the American and French Revolutions.’ Even Jefferson, one of the great American admirers of France, had lost his enthusiasm for its revolution. Many influential modern ...”

“... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...”

“... are logarithms, a type of mathematical operation first described by the Scottish mathematician John Napier in 1614. If you are multiplying a number p by itself to get another number q, the logarithm of q to base p is how many times you need to do the multiplication to reach q. So the logarithm of 8 to base 2 is 3, because you have to multiply 2 by itself ...”

“... and dismal out. As we walked down to the centre to see what was happening, a child of about six took one look at me with my hood up and sunglasses on and said categorically: ‘It’s way past your bedtime.’ Suitably chastised, I resolved to take it a lot easier that day. Many people, it seemed, felt the same.Saturday day was accordingly spent uncovering ...”

“... and statuary, and finding that vein of taste commended by the mighty Delacroix, Cezanne always took it as read that his own work would obey expressive rhythms.Sometimes his ‘expressive’ accelerates into ‘wilful’. The droller ventures on show at Tate Modern play with the question ‘Will this be a painting, if I paint it?’ An abrupt slice of Paris ...”

“... all to impress his mate.) Some Facebook posters even worry about spontaneous combustion, which I took to be just another flex, until on the hottest day of 2022, a wildfire started in a dry heap in the village of Wennington on the edge of East London and burned down eighteen houses. Compost doesn’t need to be hot and very often it isn’t. High temperatures ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... had exhibited his work – then entirely abstract – to acclaim in Paris, London and Amsterdam. John Ashbery, reviewing the paintings in 1961, admired their ‘breathless urgency’. But halfway through the decade Arikha experienced what he would later describe as ‘a violent hunger in the eyes’. Face to face with Caravaggio’s The Raising of ...”

“... couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the ...”

“... ethos into a few schools in Birmingham’. The so-called Trojan Horse scandal spread until it took in more than twenty schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... be not banned but ‘battled’ with, in open debate. For example, the Battle of Ideas I attended took place the week after Nick Griffin’s turn on Question Time, so there was lots of talk about ‘the right to be offensive’ and ‘illiberal liberalism’, while at the same time it was made clear that the principle of free speech was being defended, not ...”

“... no souvenir Amikejo flags, no reproduction postage stamps, nothing. The inn where the inhabitants took their solemn decision for Esperanto became the Skyline Disco, which is now a rain-filled hole in the ground. Only the stone border markers in the woods survive, topped with snow and laced with dead brambles. There’s a reason for the amnesia. This corner of ...”

“... that the North Koreans had failed to honour their commitments, and the enriched-uranium programme took on a life of its own in the US media. In November 2002, the CIA reported that a gas centrifuge facility for enriching uranium was ‘at least three years from becoming operational’ in the DPRK; once up and running, however, it might provide fissile ...”