“... he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free drinks, science-themed rock bands, cake, decor and a dancing gorilla’ (stuffed with a relay of biology students). Circulating around the university, student and faculty volunteers declaimed the entire text of the Origin.On the Galapagos Islands, tourists making scientific haj were ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... by a hierarchical structure of recruitment, first catching teens through their dabblings in rock music and games, and selecting the best for initiation into witchcraft cults, from which the ‘hard-core’ are chosen. The ultimate aim is to induce world chaos which will encourage the populace to accept Satan – in personified form – as the earth’s ...”

“... waving cushions and towels, and some were leaning out. It happened that one of the firefighters, David Badillo, knew two of the uncles, Carlos and Manfred Ruiz, from the sports centre – they had all worked there as lifeguards – and Melanie gave Badillo her keys to their flat, 176 on the 20th floor. (They still hadn’t heard from Jessica.) Badillo went ...”

“... to remember how she was overtaken by lust. For twenty years, she was faithful, ‘firm as a rock. Incorruptible. I always lived on a higher plane than other women because I was someone who stood for all the virtues.’ She rages at her body – which she now calls her enemy. ‘Cursed flesh, what have you done to my soul?’ But Luísa’s lover tells ...”

“... influence may have been transmitted via this route, it is worth considering the case of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian Seventh-Day Adventists. The siege at Waco had an uncannily Zoroastrian ending. Not only is fire, the eschatological cleanser, the sacred element of Zoroastrianism; and not only is Koresh, meaning Cyrus, the name of the ...”

“... and the not quite pea green of the kråkebolle, those little sea urchins that gulls snatch from rock pools and carry high into the air, soaring above the cliffs and then letting the little bodies fall over and over again till they break on the rocks below and the tangle of edible ooze and viscera hidden within the shell is exposed. My favourite thing to do ...”

“... Mohamed al-Assar, became assistant minister of defence. To further emphasise his reluctance to rock the boat, Morsi chose their replacements from a list of senior commanders. The director of military intelligence, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was handed the defence portfolio, and the commander of the Third Field Army, Sedky Sobhy, was promoted to chief of ...”

“... said that, for all our uncertainty, we have a pretty good fix on the basic nature of the physical. David Lewis once claimed that ‘the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions is very well understood.’ But this isn’t true. It isn’t true even when we put aside the point that the known phenomena of experience are wholly a matter of the ...”

“... two weeks on the coast with Éluard and his second wife, Dominique, a woman ‘as solid as the rock of Gibraltar’ and ‘just the kind Pablo liked’. Gilot sensed that ‘Paul wasn’t the real reason for his trip.’ Picasso denied everything but her suspicions were confirmed by a friend: he had been spotted by journalists embarking on a ‘new ...”

“... Lands on the favoured shelf: John S.C. Abbott’s The Terror of the Indians (or the Life of David Crockett), or Adventures in Field, Flood & Forest (Stories of Danger & Daring). These inspirational tales, intended for youths who might strike out for the colonies and malarial swamps, were ‘founded on the real experiences of those who figure in ...”

“... folks in all parts of the world.’ These connections have been discussed more recently by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2010), and by Juergen Zimmerer in From Windhoek to Auschwitz? (2019). The links between the genocide in South-West Africa and the Holocaust depend on something else that Zimmerer makes clear: the ...”

“... though the prevalence of words like ‘halcyon’ makes us suspicious: the properties of sun, rock, sea, olive and cypress resist assimilation. Even the supposed ‘surrealism’ of Elytis’s early poems remains an elusive quality: of these only ‘Helen’ – ‘Forehead to windowpane we keep watch for the new sorrow’ – convincingly succeeds. But ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The ...”