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“... may think we know more than we do. We think we know that ‘Ancient Britons’ painted themselves blue with woad, that Celtic paganism involved nude female dancing, and that human sacrifice was carried out by the ubiquitous druids. Pliny reported the naked woad-stained processions of British women ‘at certain sacred rites’, and Tacitus gave a dramatic ...”

“... occurs in an early poem which appears to be fretful about gratification. In her translation of St Gregory Nazianzen’s ‘Soul and Body’, she has the rhetorician pray for the right words, ones that ‘may flourish/Of which mine enemy would spoil me,/Using pleasurehood to foil me!’ But the poem’s own fondness for verbal flourishes isn’t easily ...”

“... was a third-generation arriviste. His grandfather, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Trollope’s Sir Gregory Hardlines, pushed his way from nothing to the top of the Civil Service, marrying Macaulay’s sister on the way. His father pushed his way into high politics, marrying a cotton fortune on the way. G.M. Trevelyan himself was pushed into the Mastership of ...”

“... they all were. Ginsberg arrived at Columbia wanting to be a labour lawyer who would fight for blue-collar rights, but under the influence of Burroughs and Lucien Carr he soon began to see himself as a poète maudit and Nietzschean transgressor. Burroughs handed out reading-lists that included Gide, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Lautrèamont, and introduced into ...”

“... the 1950s’. Highlight the ‘survivor’ bit. The last poet left standing in the saloon. (Think Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths surround the man, among enthusiasts, cultists and close readers, and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may ...”

“... and made at least one donation towards its running costs. But a memorandum prepared for Pope Gregory XIII in the early 1570s, very probably by Nicolo Ormanetto, one of Pole’s closest collaborators, reveals that Pole had had ideas of his own for an English college in Rome which would do for England what the Germanicum was to do for Germany. Ever since ...”

“... it before now.’ It was July and he was wearing a seersucker jacket, a rather punctured jumper, blue trousers that stopped short of his sneakers, a Panama hat, and he was holding onto a cane. ‘I apologise for the delinquent Edwardian look,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’Somewhere along the road, Karl became deeply fascinated by the satellite ...”

“... that the bluer the eyes the greater the capacity to withstand pain: ‘As the colour went through blue-grey, green, hazel, light brown and dark brown so the reaction to pain increased on the average.’ Similar prejudices permeated discussions of how much pain was felt by women as compared to men. Francis Galton argued that European women may seem more ...”

“... round the North Cape to Murmansk. Once we put on proper uniforms we’d long since given up for blue battle dress, except in Reykjavík, and were inspected by a baffled and rather cross admiral. After a year or so our discipline, such as it was, may be said to have faltered; Archer continued to dispense punishments, but less often and less severely. It was ...”

“... the place keeping the planet from exploding. I remember a lecture about Vico, a lecture by Richard Gregory on the physiology of perception, for all the world as if a Pelican book had come to life, and a rather baffled aged British traveller to Eastern Parts, who talked with all the ease of his upbringing of ‘fuzzy wuzzies’ while I squeezed someone’s hand ...”

“... had prepared me for this. In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning ...”

“... mind’s eye,In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied onesAppear and disappear in the blue depth of the skyWith all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,The uncontrollable mystery on the ...”

“... six days later, the death of the child she calls Amiir (sometimes referred to elsewhere as Boy Gregory). He was born in 1996 with Pfeiffer syndrome type 2, a rare genetic defect that causes the foetus’s cranial bones to fuse, resulting in severe skeletal and systemic abnormalities. Garcia’s account of her husband’s bizarre behaviour in the aftermath ...”

“... was an important source for his literary work. ‘Double bind’ is a dubious idea borrowed from Gregory Bateson, who in 1956 proposed that ‘paradoxical communications’ – when, for example, a mother on whom a child is wholly dependent offers food or comfort and at the same time gives signs of refusing it – cause schizophrenia. The popular press took ...”

“... and it is more marked than it was when Kennan was at the State Department.The anthropologist Gregory Feldman, author of The Migration Apparatus, cites a well-known study of 2006 from the UN University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, which found that the richest 2 per cent of the world’s adults owned half its wealth. The figure ...”