“... to strip, but the charming detail from Giacomo Jaquerio’s painting that adorns the jacket of Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes’s book suggests that this is the convention.) Immortality is not synonymous with eternal youth, however, and Olshansky and Carnes remind us of one of the less well-known stories in Gulliver’s Travels. It involves a tiny minority ...”

“... isolated incident. Two years ago a group of students at St Hugh’s put on blackface to illustrate Jay-Z and Kanye West’s ‘Niggas in Paris’ as part of a ‘song titles’-themed bop. Only 3.9 per cent of Oxford’s professors have a Black and Minority Ethnic background; even at Cambridge the figure is 6.4 per cent. Undergraduates can still complete a ...”

“... his natural allies we have to understand something of Finley’s background. Whether or not Martin Jay is correct in The Dialectical Imagination in crediting the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung with such an influential part in the revitalisation of Marxism in the Thirties and Forties through the development of what they called Critical Theory (so named ...”

“... J.B.S. Haldane’s unique mixture of militant rationalism and paradoxical intelligence. Peter Medawar would be a duller writer if he didn’t hate all pompous writing, and all philosophy except Popper’s. Gould’s idiosyncracies are a passion for the quirks of history, and a conviction that a man’s science is part of his humanity, and not ...”

“... he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore. The man has embraced infamy like a bride. At least Peter Sutcliffe kept his mouth shut. After his arrest, Nilsen never stopped talking: letters to the Guardian, pages and pages on his state of mind for the police. Indeed, in retrospect, it is this aspect of Nilsen – his unrelenting fascination with words ...”

“... because of its ‘human’ dimension, as in the immense, neo-Darwinian undertaking of Stephen Jay Gould, the books of Lewis Wolpert, Peter Medawar’s essays, the psychiatric narratives of Oliver Sacks or the clinical deliberations of Sherwin Nuland; and finally the heroic attempts to describe a single ...”

“... you got a tourniquet, Robin?’ and he answered apologetically, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t, Peter,’ I looked at the second man. Only his clothes distinguished him as a human being, and they were badly charred. His face was gone: in place of it was a huge yellow vegetable. The eyes blinked in it, eyes without lashes, and a grotesque huge mouth dribbled ...”

“... Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic ...”

“... of Time, has remained in the best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic for months. Stephen Jay Gould, the American evolutionary biologist, writes essays that are a delight to read. The late Sir Peter Medawar was a consummate stylist. But these few names aside, where, one asks oneself, are the modern equivalents of ...”

“... and his refusal to peddle scientistic obscurities when everyday language was perfectly adequate. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees takes a similar line when it comes to describing the behaviour of trees, but unlike de Waal Wohlleben is not a professional scientist. He is a forester who has worked with scientists, and it is his decades-long ...”

“... apocalypses in the New Testament (and therefore not accepted as such by all Biblical scholars) is Peter’s vision in Acts. Falling into a trance on the roof of a house, Peter sees the sky open up and a great sheet being lowered down. In it are animals of every possible sort, ‘whatever walks or crawls or flies’. A voice ...”

“... of the feelings generated. Most interesting in this respect is one of the newcomers to the debate, Peter Saulson. ‘It’s been just my luck to live my entire scientific career inside a case study,’ he writes. For twenty years he has worked on gravitational wave physics, the topic of a series of sociological investigations by Collins. He talks of his ...”

“... The next, far more consequential, step is the genome editing of human embryos. As the geneticist Peter Visscher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu put it earlier this year in an article for Nature, genome editing has the potential to create ‘human phenotypes that have never been previously observed’. Stephen Hsu, founder of the embryo screening company ...”

“... for insanity. But first he wanted to be rich. Warhol’s attitude to money was a cross between Jay Gatsby’s and Holly Golightly’s – he yearned for the world where money allowed you to be whoever you wanted to be, where money was confidence and confidence was character, and where each day was a promise of diamonds as big as the Ritz. Carmel Snow, who ...”

“... in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government ...”