“... responsibility’ for what they had done. At Los Alamos, Feynman wrote, the great mathematician John von Neumann ‘gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility … It’s made me a very happy man ever since.’ The great thing about ...”

“... he called ‘gemmules’. August Weisman, one of the greatest zoologists of the late 19th century, took things much further by speculating that the elements of heredity were stored in the substance ‘of a definite chemical, and above all, molecular composition’ which he called ‘germ-plasm’; and that the germ-plasm stored in germ cells was ‘held in ...”

“... Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly ...”

“... pleasure in the greening of his bronzes by oxidation (especially near the sea). Talking to John Fowles in 1987, Andy Goldsworthy came out with this wonderfully relaxed notion: ‘Ten years ago I made a line of stones in Morecambe Bay. It is still there, buried under the sand, unseen. All my work still exists, in some form.’ That is of course true of ...”

“... first husband, ‘knew every painting’ in Venice and they bought some old furniture together. John Holms, for whom she left Vail, seems to have been less well informed. ‘In Toledo,’ she tells us, ‘we spent the whole day searching for El Greco’s painting of that city, not knowing that it was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.’ Alfred ...”

“... drawings, the bright colours they prepared and used. After going to agricultural college, Malevich took a job with a railway company, saving his money and painting (he sold some of these works, though none has survived). Eventually, he had accumulated enough cash to make the long train journey to Moscow, where he arrived in 1904, already in his late ...”

“... no defence of necessity against a charge of murder. Dudley and Stephens were two of four men who took to a lifeboat when their yacht, Mignonette, was wrecked. After twenty days at sea without food and water, three of the men killed and ate the ship’s boy. In rejecting their defence of necessity the court transformed the law. The previous year Sir James ...”

“... who had delighted him by reading the argument on the Protestant ethic as if it were a novel, took him to Bayreuth and elsewhere, and adored him for the rest of his life. Greatly taken among other things with the boots and gaiters he wore as a medical director in the reserve at the start of the war, she offered a sensuality that he would not otherwise ...”

“... officers and merchants. The wars finally ended with a peace deal in 2005, after which South Sudan took the exit option, voting for secession twelve years ago. With it went most of the oilfields and the revenue to which Khartoum’s traders had become addicted. By then, Darfur had also rebelled, after decades of neglect during which it was exploited by ...”

“... Similar horrors confronted Wotton when accompanying Essex’s Irish campaign in 1599; he took with him a verse-letter from his university friend John Donne, though for Rutter ‘it’s anyone’s guess how, as a soldier headed into a guerrilla war, he read the fantastically tortured images Donne wrapped around ...”

“... we in a Catholic church?’ She had once stabbed a priest to death in a film involving John Mills so knew about churches. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly. At which point a plumpish man in a cassock crossed the chancel in order to collect a book from a pew, bowing to the altar en route. ‘See that,’ said the interviewer. ‘The bowing? That’s part ...”

“... businessmen eager to pick up estates from disillusioned rural aristocrats, who themselves commonly took company directorships to supplement their unsatisfactory incomes. Meanwhile, agricultural labourers, except in parts of the North of England, had average earnings below the poverty line, commonly lived in rustic slums, and were understandably eager to get ...”

“... Lover’, ‘Hill of the Bees’, ‘A Myth Enacted’, ‘Slow Bell from the High Hill’, ‘John Hunter’s Canal’, ‘The Lawn of Trees and Rocks’, ‘Quelle Histoire’, and (an unusual exertion of sympathy) ‘Dulled Son of Man’. In a poem to Ivor Gurney, Grigson, who can sometimes be magnanimous to the dead, hails Gurney as a poet of ...”

“... century, and thus ‘unmask’ what is being done by people whose highest hopes are still those of John Stuart Mill. When people who take this line are asked what alternative concepts they would recommend, they usually reply that the question is premature. Self-criticism must come first. We need to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, or to become aware of ...”

“... the authors sadly make us doubt their scholarly credentials. Jo Gladstone’s interesting study of John Ray quotes a passage that she attributes to Bishop Wilkins when it is, in fact, from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, and elsewhere she says that Thomas Blount ‘first used the title term “hard words’ ” when, in fact, it appears in the title of the ...”