“... Johnson must insist not only that all lives are unsatisfactory but that the differences of wealth, class and even of health hardly matter. ‘Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’ Those who seem comfortable are no better off than those in want; the lords who seem powerful are as uneasy as the herdsman who ...”

“... Medieval societies which can hardly not be considered Christian, churchmen waged a continuous war against rural superstitions for many centuries: in the eighth century, St Boniface protested to the Pope about pagan celebrations of New Year’s Day in Rome itself! The argument that Christianity has left few archaeological traces is conceptually ...”

“... which have made the drawing of benefit much more widely acceptable (for instance, among middle-class students and young people) than it used to be. But the clinching argument against either a trade union or a ‘poverty trap’ explanation of the rise in unemployment is that the latter is a common international phenomenon. It would be quite remarkable if ...”

“... mosaics, and roofed with gilded tiles, almost all sadly destroyed by Allied bombing during World War Two, and not discussed by Winterling (a few remaining fragments are on show in the Palazzo Massimo Museum in Rome). Caligula’s preoccupation with a high standard of living accommodation is also implied by the philosopher Philo’s wonderfully vivid account ...”

“... we later learn, ‘that peculiar calm, virgin contempt of the free-born for the base-born’. This class-based understanding of nonchalance was, however, already out of date. In revising Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence removed from it the last traces of the propaganda for a new aristocracy which had driven his writing in the years after the end of the ...”

“... Sharks are cartilaginous fishes (they have a skeleton made of cartilage, not bone) of the sub-class elasmobranchii, which also includes rays and skates. There are more than four hundred species, ranging from the dwarf lanternshark (about 15 cm) to the whale shark, the biggest fish in the sea (‘Max: possibly 1700-2100 cm’, according to my Princeton ...”

“... a catastrophic disillusionment with himself and with the corrupt hypocrisy of the English ruling class – reflected, he believed, in the fashionable disgust with which his private affairs were treated. ‘I have been more ravished,’ he would write in a letter in 1819, ‘than anybody since the Trojan war.’ That he ...”

“... the Tudor corporation that maintained Britain’s necklace of lighthouses. During the Crimean War, he advises the Admiralty on the feasibility of an attack on the Baltic port of Cronstadt, using ships filled with four hundred tonnes of burning sulphur. He exchanges ideas, papers and compliments with Pickersgill, Dodgson, the chemist Justus von Liebig, the ...”

“... in the early 1970s, refugees from their turbulent countries, with Folasadé ‘on the run from a war’ and Kweku ‘fleeing a peace that could kill’. They have four children, while Kweku works as a surgeon and Fola sets up a flower stall, which prospers and expands. Parents and children are all Americanised to various degrees, and African mythologies are ...”

“... West Saxon version, based on the Chronicle, which begins with King Alfred waging guerrilla war on the Vikings from his hideout at Athelney in 878, then goes on through the English recovery under his many descendants down to Edward the Confessor, and the eventual unification of England under the West Saxon dynasty. How did the story look elsewhere, and ...”

“... to explain that my ‘conference budget’ didn’t stretch to the $75,000 speaker fee and first-class return airfare. Ariely is not a typical academic. He has given very popular Ted talks, sells consultancy advice on behavioural prediction and has founded a number of companies to profit from his insights into the vagaries of human decision-making. The focus ...”

“... them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.’ There is no longer any doubt that the rise in global sea levels will reshape human civilisation. Goodell focuses on the city, that unit of human organisation small enough to have local leaders ...”

“... San Fernando Valley, complete with piano lessons (‘Yes, this was a white, upper-middle-class childhood at the height of Empire’); his precocious enthralment to horror movies, which tattooed the message that violence and evil were causeless and random, punching black holes into the humdrum everyday; his assertion that the absence of helicopter ...”

“... the Ancient Mariner’ in the form of the madly vengeful Ahab. If you were at a creative writing class and said you wanted to write a novel embodying the obsessive imagination of the romantic hero in the captain of a whale ship as a modern Hamlet plonked in the middle of a factory floating on the sea, your instructors would no doubt be encouraging, because ...”

“... that estimates of the killings of ethnic Albanians were wildly exaggerated in the prelude to the war (100,000 against a verified total of 3000, according to a recent report). Whatever else is to be made of Milosevic’s recent replacement (by another hardline Serb nationalist), it’s not plausibly seen as an outpouring of gratitude by the Serbian people ...”