“... might have taken his ten-year-old son to Coventry to see the entertainments laid on for Queen Elizabeth is firmly quashed (there’s no evidence for any such excursion and Tudor family life wasn’t like that), and, as if as an emblem of the fate of all such sweetly decorative fancies, even Schoenbaum’s account of the pretty bedroom walls at the Oxford ...”

“... in Africa; I attended the opening of a health centre a year or so ago in West Nile Province in the North of Uganda. The four-wheel drive vehicle bearing the District Medical Officer arrived with the slogans of the Ugandan anti-Aids campaign painted on its doors in English: ‘Love Carefully’, ‘Zero Grazing’. The Medical Officer, and the Chairman of the ...”

“... and prizes in the Seven Years’ War, he was disappointed; much of his time was spent guarding North Sea fisheries. He served as a ‘landman’ – essentially a trainee sailor – aboard various ships, received regular pay and good but not glowing reports, saw the coast of Britain from Leith to Torbay, and acquired a taste for tobacco. He was discharged ...”

“... In the year he died, Cornell remembered that he sent one of his boxes to a starlet called Sheree North, but never heard from her. When Audrey Hepburn gave a performance as Ondine in New York in 1954, he sent her one of his owl boxes in tribute. She had it sent back to his home. Tilly Losch, the international good-time girl, and a recipient of Cornell’s ...”

“... all the claptrap that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ...”

“... rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... to tell the tale.Emecheta was born in Lagos in July 1944, the wettest month at latitudes just north of the equator. Her father was a railway worker who had fought with the British in Burma and her mother was a seamstress. She was born eight weeks early, a baby not much bigger than a rat, and a girl when every newlywed wished for a boy. She survived by ...”

“... have seen it in my first vacation from Oxford in January 1955 and in memory had put it somewhere north of Oxford Street, Portman Square possibly. In fact it was in Forbes House in Belgrave Square: not knowing London I took Knightsbridge to be Oxford Street. Of the exhibition I recall only the two huge blackamoors at the foot of the staircase in the entrance ...”

“... by no means always been the case. Fifty-odd million years ago, not only was there no ice at the North Pole, the temperature there was 23ºC. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last cool snap of this current ice age – known as a ‘glacial’, to distinguish it from the warmer ‘interglacial’ of the type we are living through now – much of ...”

“... of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a Utopian republic akin to that planned by his contemporary Tommaso Campanella in southern Italy. The concluding essay, on the relationship of ...”

“... his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new book is pitched at street-level. It asks to be called vivid, and often is – though, profligate of detail, Boyle can overplay the enchantment of objects: Volvos imported by ...”

“... spotted an advertisement for Whale Cay, a tiny island in the British West Indies thirty miles north-west of Nassau and ninety miles east of Miami. After visiting and chatting with its two residents – a black lighthouse keeper and his wife – she bought the island outright for $40,000. ‘I am going to live surrounded only by coloured people,’ she ...”

“... where threatened species live now, or do you try to set aside land, say, a hundred miles to the north of where a species now lives in anticipation of warmer global temperatures shifting ecosystems northward? Is a hundred miles far enough? Too far? Given all the unknowns, does this strategy make any sense? As the recent UN report notes, more than half a ...”