“... chemical nature of the planet, some may involve feedback that helps life itself to continue,’ Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in the LRB of 19 February 2015. ‘If they come about, they do so as fortuitous by-products of the evolution of particular living things.’ Andrew Watson, the co-creator of Daisyworld, later distanced himself from Lovelock’s ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I used to like a screwdriver. Two was my limit, with three making me tipsy, which I found delightful. Had I been able to remain in that intermediate state I suppose I could have been a ...”

“... reformers. On his last day in court, just before his death sentence was delivered, Thistlewood rose to some eloquence (though he started quaveringly, being an awkward and rather timorous speaker):A few hours hence, and I will be no more, but the nightly breeze, which will whistle over the silent grave that shall protect me from its keenness, will bear to ...”

“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”

“... was probably no causal connection, but it meant that my publisher could buy me the original of a Peter Brookes cartoon which appeared in the Times. It shows a House of Commons green bench, deserted apart from two figures. Fox, eyes staring and face aghast, is reading out his resignation speech, while next to him a colleague hides his face behind a book: it ...”

“... Kauffman, exhibited pictures with an eye to having them reproduced for the print market. In 1819, Rose Emma Drummond showed a portrait of Hannah Thatcher, ‘a young lady born deaf and dumb’, as the catalogue entry explained gravely, ‘who was presented to Her late Majesty on acquiring the faculty of speech, and the sense of hearing’. Few ...”

“... 1974. In February the SNP won seven seats with 22 per cent of the national vote. In October, that rose to eleven seats with 30 per cent. While the party surged into second place in Labour seats across the country, most of its new MPs represented the old unionist heartlands that Petrie emphasises: places like Banffshire, Argyll, and Moray and Nairn, where ...”

“... returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you. Six thousand ...”

“... of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist awakening’ in the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Admiralty’s dogma that ‘the best guarantee for the peace of the world is a supreme British fleet’ became the leading edge of Imperial ...”

“... His body was found a week later by an Italian hovercraft crew. Overnight, the waters around Mythe rose with a speed that staggered the flood specialists. Perry showed me a chart plotting the level of the River Severn at the bridge next to the waterworks, sourced from an agency gauge. A red line charts the story of the floods of winter 2000; from a high base ...”

“... anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food ...”

“... scale. Jung the psychoanalyst was nearly as gifted as Jung the psychiatrist. And fittingly he rose to the same degree of pre-eminence in the new movement: editor of the first journal, official head of the International Psychoanalytic Association, gentile ‘son and heir’ of the man who had invented the procedure. But weaknesses began to show. Over the ...”

“... As both the expectations which voters now had of the Welfare State and the costs of meeting them rose in parallel, so did their unwillingness to have it funded out of their own pockets. Soaking the rich was not a sufficient answer; punitive levels of tax at the upper end of the distribution of incomes, even if they could be effectively applied, were not ...”